New Zealand Stock Exchange Hit Repeatedly by Cybercriminals Demanding Bitcoin

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.

See also: Twitter Hack Used Bitcoin to Cash In: Here’s Why