NZ Exchange Invaded For Fourth Day – Foreign Sources Blamed

WELLINGTON, NZ: They don’t call it the Shaky Isles for nothing, people were saying after the New Zealand Stock Exchange crashed for the fourth consecutive day on Friday – but the course of the outages turned out to be cyber attacks – though from where was still a mystery at the weekend, according to a Reuters report.

“We can see the Internet traffic was coming through the global gateway, therefore we know it originated offshore, but it’s near impossible to identify where it originated from,” network service provider Spark told Reuters.

The exchange – also known as Te Paehoko O Aotearoa – was closed for trading until Friday afternoon, after the NZX called in help.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson later said the Government Communications Security Bureau and the national agency fighting cybercrime had been called in to help get the exchange up and running safely again.

The exchange had previously been hit on Tuesday and Wednesday by distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, which can flood a server with Internet traffic.