Hong Kong Stock Exchange says its website was hacked while it halted derivatives trading to fix unrelated software bug
- The open-access website of the HKEX was hacked yesterday, the second such cyberattack since August 2011
- An unrelated software bug in the Genium INET trading platform, which forced the exchange to suspend derivatives trading yesterday, has been isolated and fixed
Hong Kong’s stock exchange website was hacked yesterday, while the bourse had halted derivatives transactions to fix an unrelated software bug, as the operator faced a combination of technical outages at a time of heightened sensitivity about the city’s role as Asia’s third-largest financial marketplace.
The open-access website of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) was subject to a distributed denial-of service attack (DDoS), where hackers overwhelmed the network with massive incoming traffic, which slowed down and disrupted its ability to display exchange prices and financial data, said the bourse’s chief executive officer Charles Li Xiaojia.
On the same day, a technical bug was found in a vendor’s trading software for derivative financial products, which forced the exchange to suspend the trading of futures and options yesterday afternoon, Li said. Trading resumed today after the exchange returned to using an older version of the software without the bug, he said.
“We will continue to invest more to safeguard and improve” the information and technical infrastructure at the exchange, Li said at a press conference. “We hope the public has the confidence in the robustness of our system.”
Traders rushed back to the derivatives market today when transactions resumed, with 986,197 contracts, including 171,214 contracts on the Hang Seng Index futures, changing hands as of 6:30pm, in line with the daily average volume in August.