New Zealand Stock Exchange Hit Repeatedly by Cybercriminals Demanding Bitcoin

NZX has halted trading for the third day in a row as a result of cybercriminals attempting to extort cryptocurrency.

By Sebastian Sinclair

Aug 27, 2020 at 10:19 a.m. UTC

Updated Sep 14, 2021 at 9:48 a.m. UTC

New Zealand stock tickers (Phil Walter/Getty)

Sebastian Sinclair

The New Zealand stock exchange has halted trading for the third day in a row as a result of criminal cyberattacks.

According to a report by Bloomberg on Thursday, the NZX exchange has suffered connectivity issues leading to a series of outages that were the result of targeted disruption by bad actors from outside the country.
The criminals are demanding bitcoin in order to cease the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which flood the bandwidth of a particular system with traffic and rendering it slow or unusable.
The exchange suffered outages during the last hour of trading on Tuesday and again for over three hours on Wednesday.
Today’s outage has yet to be resolved, according to Bloomberg.
According to another report by ZDNet, the attacks may be directed by a criminal cyber gang using monikers including Amada Collective and Fancy Bear that belong to more famous hacker groups.
Specifically, the attackers have been targeting the exchange's hosting service Spark, demonstrating a level of sophistication by regularly changing the protocols involved.
Over recent weeks, the group has tried to extort bitcoin from other well-known financial services including PayPal, MoneyGram, YesBank India, Braintree and Venmo.

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DDoS New Zealand Bitcoin Extortion

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