New Zealand Stock Exchange Halted by Cyber-Attack (bbc.com) 22
The New Zealand stock exchange was knocked offline two days in a row due to a cyber-attack. From a report NZX said it had first been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack from abroad, on Tuesday. The exchange said the attack had "impacted NZX network connectivity" and it had decided to halt trading in cash markets just before 16:00 local time. Trading halted briefly for a second time, on Wednesday, but was back up and running before the end of the day. A DDoS attack is a relatively simple type of cyber-attack, in which a large array of computers all try to connect to an online service at once, overwhelming its capacity. They often use devices compromised by malware the owners do not know are part of the attack.
Genuine traders may have had problems carrying out their business. But it does not mean any financial or personal information was accessed.
does not mean any...information was accessed. (Score:1)
:-) Very optimistic of you
Eh, run the commodities markets with cheap commodity hard/software, and this will become more common.
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As far as not running on commodity hardware, I think that is quite a leap. If they put out an RFP for specialized hardware to run their cash markets I think it would just attract bad actors into the supply chain, who'd build in backdoors right out of the gate probably at the chip level.
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I think it would just attract bad actors into the supply chain, who'd build in backdoors right out of the gate probably at the chip level.
Already there.. Even if they make everything in house, they can't trust anybody, but they can reduce the risks by using obfuscated methods
Size of attack? (Score:2)
There have been many attacks in recent years that would exceed the total available bandwidth on the trans-pacific cable network, do we have any numbers of the size of these attacks? I'm just wondering if all of NZ and AU are likely to feel knockon effects of such attacks or if this is just a run of the mill kind of thing that hiding behind Cloudflare or one of the other DDoS services will handle?
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I have notice a few off shore based services being sluggish but no major distractions, so it would be rather hard to directly attribute them to this DDoS vs just general Internet flakyness that is seen from time to time. No issues with local websites and service during the same time.
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Reportedly it is a DNS reflection attack targeting an upstream router at 60 - 100 Gbps. They have gone down again for the third day running, the trading systems are fine, it is just the exchange's website affected, but because they are unable to post company announcements in a timely manner, the exchange has to halt trading.
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There have been many attacks in recent years that would exceed the total available bandwidth on the trans-pacific cable network, do we have any numbers of the size of these attacks?
For NZ, 38.4kbps. That's enough to knock both modems offline.
Country with its act together!We need that to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
New Zealand is one of the few countries that hasn't gone all stupid in the past few year. Strong Informed Democracy, leadership that take measured and reasonable course of actions targeted to benefit of its citizens. A culture in general accept diversity and welcomes it.
That means people see them as a threat and will try to disrupt them in any way possible. Because you can't have a beacon of sanity in a world of chaos.
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Make me always question if our ancestors set us up to fail millennia ago. Not enough gain for the winter; time to rob the neighbor! That other king has a nicer castle; time for a siege. Those people have a different god, time for a crusade.
My point being for all of history we've been this way. Just think if the neighbors helped each out with the grain, if the king with the nicer castle offered some labor to make the others nicer, and if at an early age of our species we realized no one was right on the god
Wealth inequality throughout history (Score:2)
Make me always question if our ancestors set us up to fail millennia ago. Not enough gain for the winter; time to rob the neighbor! That other king has a nicer castle; time for a siege. Those people have a different god, time for a crusade. My point being for all of history we've been this way.
And yet, throughout history our ancestors have used that scheme to get us to the point we are now. That same system got humans up to and through the enlightenment, to the point where we have large portions of the planet running under basic human rights and on the verge of a wealth economy.
Just think if the neighbors helped each out with the grain, if the king with the nicer castle offered some labor to make the others nicer, and if at an early age of our species we realized no one was right on the god front.
We tried that, several times. It was called communism, and it resulted in massive numbers of death and misery everywhere it was tried: 25 million dead in the Soviet Union, 100 million dead in China, with similar outcomes i
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Make me always question if our ancestors set us up to fail millennia ago. Not enough gain for the winter; time to rob the neighbor! That other king has a nicer castle; time for a siege. Those people have a different god, time for a crusade. My point being for all of history we've been this way.
And yet, throughout history our ancestors have used that scheme to get us to the point we are now. That same system got humans up to and through the enlightenment, to the point where we have large portions of the planet running under basic human rights and on the verge of a wealth economy.
Just think if the neighbors helped each out with the grain, if the king with the nicer castle offered some labor to make the others nicer, and if at an early age of our species we realized no one was right on the god front.
We tried that, several times. It was called communism, and it resulted in massive numbers of death and misery everywhere it was tried: 25 million dead in the Soviet Union, 100 million dead in China, with similar outcomes in Cambodia, Bulgaria, and everywhere else [wikipedia.org].
Wealth inequality seems to be a fundamental property of the mathematics, and you can see a good explanatory animation here [youtube.com].
Basically, start everyone with a fixed amount of money and have a completely honest system of exchanges: take two people who put up $1 each, flip a coin, and the winner gets both dollars. When you do that, the graph of amount of money per person is a Boltzmann distribution [springer.com]. The square root of the number of people owns half the wealth, and the square root of the square root owns half of that, and so on.
This indicates that completely fair competition on anything that can be measured for value will eventually approach a Boltzmann distribution (or Pareto distribution, depending on the economic rules), and we see this: a million books are published each year, but 1000 of them gather half the sales. Professional basketball player scores, classical music composers... just about anything that can be measured with a conserved value will eventually approach this distribution.
The problem with communism appears to be that the amount of control necessary to force the system into an IID distribution [wikipedia.org] of wealth has to approach tyranny, and this inevitably leads to massive death and destruction. The Boltzmann distribution is so strongly favored that you need a lot of effort to force it into something else - effort that is not used productively in the system. Essentially, you're using so much energy enforcing the rules that you have too little energy left over for creative output.
Just think if [...]
About that. As flawed as our current system is I recommend keeping the system that generates tangible wealth and pulls at least some of the world population out of misery and death, instead of the other way that seems to force everyone into nothing but misery, death, and more death.
No offense but, you realize that except for the word "communism", that's almost the exact same argument that China makes now, right? That's the argument they're running to their own citizens about how good the current government is.
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IMPLEMENTATION!
IMPLEMENTATION!
IMPLEMENTATION!
That is a big difference of Ideal vs Practical usage. The ideals that Socialism and Communism gives are not inherently flawed however they need to be properly implemented. USSR and China had created the problem of putting in a strong man, and under one political party. In which the way it was implemented the Citizens worked for the Leader. Other version seem to work much better when there is an open and informed democracy where the leaders are working for the
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New Zealand is one of the few countries that hasn't gone all stupid in the past few year. Strong Informed Democracy, leadership that take measured and reasonable course of actions targeted to benefit of its citizens. A culture in general accept diversity and welcomes it.
That means people see them as a threat and will try to disrupt them in any way possible. Because you can't have a beacon of sanity in a world of chaos.
Unless you have additional information, your interpretation seems like a bit of a strech (Occam's razor). From TFA:
New Zealand cyber-security organisation CertNZ issued an alert in November that emails were being sent to financial firms threatening DDoS attacks unless a ransom was paid.
When you see the word "cyber" (Score:2)
Expect either science fiction stories, media hype, or somebody trying to B.S. you.
Powered by Norbert Wiener spinning in his grave.
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I'd give you the funny mod if I could. What I was looking for in the comments was insights about the increasing and essential bogosity of today's stock markets or something about following the money. Today's game is all about timing and someone probably made a big pile of profit because of the events in this story.
Re: China (Score:2)
Microsoft Windows DDOS © (Score:1)