Cyber attacks disrupt New Zealand’s stock exchange.
New Zealand’s stock exchange, NZX, recently suffered cyber attacks on six consecutive working days, resulting in it being unable to facilitate trading in shares. The attacks were “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attacks. Typically, criminals who carry out DDoS attacks request a ransom payment to prevent the attacks in the first place or to cease attacks and not carry out any more.
Insight
In most cases, the greater loss to businesses occurs when a DDoS attack prevents them from providing services to customers, so they lose income due to downtime and may incur liability to customers if their inability to provide services causes their customers to suffer loss. There are also significant intangible losses such as damage to reputation.
All businesses should undertake a risk assessment to understand their vulnerabilities in the event of a DDoS attack and what losses they may suffer, so that they can put appropriate security measures to prevent such events happening.
If your organisation is looking to comply with the requirements of the GDPR then take a look at how our CSaaS and DPaaS solutions can help.