Euronext plagued by two glitches Monday, latest exchange to go down

LONDON/NEW YORK - Exchange operator Euronext experienced two technical glitches on Monday, one which froze morning transactions in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris and another at the close, when much of the key trading activity happens.

The glitches were the latest in a string of breakdowns this year on international exchanges, including a hardware failure at the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier this month, cyberattacks that hit New Zealand's stock exchange, and a software glitch at Germany's electronic trading platform Xetra, managed by Deutsche Boerse.

The first problem happened early in the day, when Euronext said around 1000 CET (0800 GMT) that trading in all its products had been halted. Two hours later, it issued a statement saying the cause had been identified and resolved.

But after the end of trading, the exchange issued an alert saying that its cash market closure had not occurred as expected as auctions "did not take place for many instruments".

"Instead of this, trading was maintained in continuous mode for reasons that are being investigated," it said. It had decided to cancel all the trades that occurred after 1730 on all assets apart from commodities.

The end of the trading day has become the busiest time of day, with a growing portion of daily equity volumes concentrated into the five minute closing auctions. 

“If the close in any market doesn’t function properly, it’s a problem,” said Spencer Mindlin, an analyst focused on capital markets technology at Aite Group.

“Every year we’ve seen the market close gaining increased importance because of the rise of index investing and congruently ETFs, and all those mutual funds and all of those ETFs are dependent on a proper functioning process at the end of the day for benchmarking.”

BACK TO NORMAL

Euronext said trading should be back to normal on Tuesday morning.

"All order books on all asset classes will be purged prior to the call phase tomorrow morning, in order to secure smooth opening," the exchange said on its Twitter feed.

Companies affected by the glitches issued alerts. Coffee and tea group JDE Peet's and Royal Philips both said in statements that they had been informed by Euronext that they would not be provided with accurate closing prices.

"It is a huge embarrassment to Euronext," said James Angel, a finance professor at Georgetown University who specializes in market structure. But he added it was surprising that there were not more such glitches "because our trading networks are very complex IT systems."

The last major outage on a U.S. exchange was in 2018, when Intercontinental Exchange Inc's New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) suspended trading in five stocks, including Amazon and Alphabet, for part of the day due to a technical problem. 

One of the most bizarre reasons for an outage was in 1994, when a squirrel chewed through a power line in Trumbull, Connecticut, where the Nasdaq used to keep its servers, setting off a sequence of events that shut down trading on the Nasdaq for nearly an hour and a half. 

-reuters-

Microsoft seizes web domains used by North Korean hackers

Microsoft said Monday it obtained a court order allowing it to seize web domains used by North Korean hacking groups to launch cyberattacks on human rights activists, researchers and others.

The US technology giant said a federal court allowed it to take control of 50 domains operated by a group dubbed Thallium, which tricked online users by fraudulently using Microsoft brands and trademarks.

"This network was used to target victims and then compromise their online accounts, infect their computers, compromise the security of their networks and steal sensitive information," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president for customer security and trust.

"Based on victim information, the targets included government employees, think tanks, university staff members, members of organizations focused on world peace and human rights, and individuals that work on nuclear proliferation issues. Most targets were based in the US, as well as Japan and South Korea," he added.

Microsoft, which had been investigating the group through its Digital Crimes Unit and Threat Intelligence Center, said the hacking group sent spoofed emails that appeared to come from Microsoft which tricked users into revealing their login credentials, a technique known as spear phishing.

"By gathering information about the targeted individuals from social media, public personnel directories from organizations the individual is involved with and other public sources, Thallium is able to craft a personalized spear-phishing email in a way that gives the email credibility to the target," Burt said.

After getting the victim's credentials, the hackers can access emails, contact lists, calendar appointments and other data and often forwards any new emails to the attackers.

The hackers also used malicious software which can access other data on a victim's computer.

An order from a US federal court in Virginia allowed Microsoft to take control of the domains, meaning "the sites can no longer be used to execute attacks," Burt said.

Microsoft said this was the fourth nation-state group it has acted against and follows similar moves against operations from China, Russia and Iran, dubbed Barium, Strontium and Phosphorus, respectively.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Microsoft: Russia-linked hackers target sports organizations

Microsoft Corp. said it has tracked "significant" cyberattacks coming from a group it calls "Strontium" or "Fancy Bear", targeting anti-doping authorities and global sporting organizations.

The group, also called APT28, has been linked to the Russian government, Microsoft said in a blog post.

At least 16 national and international sporting and anti-doping organizations across three continents were targeted in the attacks which began on Sept. 16, according to the company.

The company said some of these attacks had been successful, but the majority had not. Microsoft has notified all customers targeted in these attacks. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

German, 20, confesses ‘annoyance’ spurred massive data hack

German authorities on Tuesday said a 20-year-old hacker had confessed to stealing and leaking private data from hundreds of politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, because he was "annoyed" by some of their public statements.

The young German, who lives with his parents, was taken into custody after police searched the family home in the western state of Hesse on Sunday. 

The suspect was not remanded in custody however because he was fully cooperating with the enquiry and not deemed a flight risk, said Georg Ungefuk, a spokesman for the Frankfurt prosecution service's internet crime office ZIT.

"The accused said he published the data because he had been annoyed by certain statements made by those affected," Ungefuk told a press conference in Wiesbaden.

The suspect, who because of his young age falls under juvenile law in Germany, told police he acted alone.

Ungefuk added that the young man had shown "clear remorse" about the stunning cyber security breach which affected around 1,000 German politicians, journalists and celebrities and piled political pressure on the government.

The information leaked online comprised home addresses, mobile phone numbers, letters, invoices and copies of identity documents. The data was first released via Twitter in December but its spread gathered pace last week.

Among those hit were members of the Bundestag lower house of parliament and the European Parliament as well as regional and local assemblies.

Deputies from all parties represented in the Bundestag were targeted with the exception of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the largest opposition group in parliament.

Speaking at the same press conference, the head of cyber security at Germany's Federal Police Office (BKA), Heiko Loehr, said it was too soon to say whether the suspect was acting out of far-right sympathies.

"We are still investigating his motives and whether they may have been criminal or politically motivated," he told reporters, adding that police were also working to confirm whether the suspect did indeed work alone.

Investigators have seized computers and hard drives from the scene that were now being combed over by experts, Ungefuk added.

He confirmed media reports that the suspect had tried to destroy a computer before the raid, but said investigators were still able to retrieve data from the damaged device. 

- 'Attack on democracy' -

Although the leak was sweeping, there is no evidence that sensitive information reached the public, investigators and the interior ministry have said.

In the vast majority of cases, only basic contact information was made available. 

The leak has nevertheless been deeply embarrassing for the political class, exposing a naive and sometimes reckless use of computer networks, and turned up the heat on the unpopular interior minister, Horst Seehofer.

Critics said the ministry and relevant authorities were slow in informing affected politicians of the leak and moving to stop it. 

Seehofer is due to speak to reporters in the afternoon. 

Beyond politicians, the leak also exposed the private data of celebrities and journalists, including chats and voicemail messages from spouses and children of those targeted.

The information derived both from social media and private "cloud" data.

The Twitter account @_0rbit published the links last month, along the lines of an advent calendar with each link to new information hidden behind a "door".

The account, which calls itself G0d and has now been suspended by Twitter, was opened in mid-2017 and purportedly has more than 18,000 followers. 

It described its activities as "security researching", "artist" and "satire and irony" and said it was based in Hamburg.

Justice Minister Katarina Barley, who last week had labelled the data dump an attack on "our democracy and its institutions", called on internet service providers and social networks "to shut down accounts as soon as they have been hacked".

German politicians and lawmakers have repeatedly fallen victim to cyberattacks in recent years.

In 2015, the Bundestag network was hit by a malware attack later blamed on Russian hackers.

In March last year, computer networks belonging to the German government came under sustained attack and data from foreign ministry staff was stolen.

At the time, Moscow denied that Russian hackers were involved.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Computer in Merkel's office hit by cyberattack - report

BERLIN, Germany - A computer in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's legislative office was hit by a cyberattack that targeted the country's lower house of parliament in May, the Bild newspaper reported on Sunday.

The daily, which did not cite its sources, said the cyberattack was broader and greater than originally anticipated and the Bundestag struggled to control it.

The attack "infected" one of the computers in Merkel's Bundestag office. Bild said the computer was one of the first on which the Trojan Horse-style attack was discovered.

According to the newspaper, the discovery was made on Friday, with officials finding the Trojan Horse software on five computers in the Bundestag.

A spokesman for Merkel's conservative CDU bloc told the newspaper he could "not confirm nor deny" the report.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the cyberattack.

Merkel's official website, as well as those of the government and the Bundestag, were blocked in January in an online attack claimed by a pro-Russian group.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com