Yesterday, the websites of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd (HKEx) were breached by hackers, according to a statement by its chief executive Charles Li. The same afternoon, derivatives market trading was disrupted. The attack on the site came as the company was trying to address the outage, but Li maintains that the two events are unrelated.
Charles Li, referring to yesterday's attack, said that hackers have targeted the company's sites several times this year, mainly through denial-of-service attacks . Regarding the problem with derivatives (derivative financial products), he said that it arose due to a error software . He did not give further details.
This outage is causing significant problems because some traders are facing losses.
However, according to a statement from HKEx, the problem has been fixed and everything is operating normally today. The software error that caused the outage has been isolatedso that it does not cause further problems.
The company's CEO said that there will be continuous checks on all procedures and every effort will be made to ensure that something like this does not happen again.
Such outages are rare in Hong Kong, but not in other countries. Various exchanges around the world have faced similar problems due to technical issues. Markets in Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore have all experienced various technical glitches in recent years.
Last month, the London Stock Exchange Group Plc was down for about an hour and 40 minutes due to a technical issue related to software.
In addition to the software issue, Li also spoke about the attacks on the company's sites. He stated that cyberattacks are now a common phenomenon and that many companies are victims of hackers. Yesterday, the company's sites HKEX.com.hk and HKEXGroup.com faced some problems due to a denial-of-service attack, resulting in a delay in the operation of the site. However, the attack was quite serious. Experts hope that something like this will not happen again.
