New Zealand Minister of Justice Andrew Little yesterday said that the nation is confronting cyberattacks on an unprecedented scale, targeting everything from the stock market to the weather service.
Little said in an interview with The Associated Press that tracking down the perpetrators of the attacks in recent weeks would be extremely difficult, as the distributed denial-of-service attacks are being routed through thousands of computers.
One line of investigation is the e-mails sent to people in some of the targeted organizations demanding a ransom in exchange for stopping the attacks, Little said.
Photo: AP
The official advice is that a ransom should never be paid.
Little said that he has been told that the sheer volume of data used by the attackers is unprecedented.
New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, is helping with the investigation and working to protect companies targeted in what it says appears to be part of a global campaign.
The attacks stopped share trading for up to several hours at a time over four days last week. Private company NZX, which hosts the market, said that it halted trading to maintain market integrity because the attacks prevented it from publishing market announcements.
The attackers had found vulnerabilities in the stock market’s operations, Little said.
“That motivated them to continue the attack, and they picked on other organizations as well,” he said.
One of those was the bank TSB, which was hit on Tuesday.
The attack disrupted some of its services, but it had a plan in place and the bank remained sound, TSB chief executive officer Donna Cooper said.
Another bank, Westpac, said that it successfully repelled an attack two weeks ago and had not been hit again since.
News organizations Stuff and RNZ reported that they had repelled attacks over the weekend.
The weather organization MetService was also hit this week, switching its Web site to a stripped-down version to stay online.
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