NZ Stock Exchange DDoS Attack

Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa At the end of August, a series of cyberattacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange over five consecutive days forced it to halt trading for a number of hours for four out of those five days. The attacks raised questions about the stock exchange’s security, as well as the threat actors’ underlying motives. “This was a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents, in which threat actors disrupted the normal traffic to the enterprise by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic at volumes that the system just couldn’t handle,” explains Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa. “In financial services terms, the New Zealand Stock Exchange is a re...