Taipei Times
Date: Sep 24, 2016
By: Ted Chen / Staff reporter

State-run First Financial Holding Co (第一金控) yesterday said that its banking and brokerage subsidiaries had repelled a “ransomware” attack by unidentified hackers that affected its online services on Thursday.

On Wednesday evening, First Securities (第一金證券) and First Commercial Bank (第一銀行) received an e-mail from hackers demanding a ransom of 50 bitcoins (US$29,916.5) or else they would face attacks to their electronic trading systems, First Financial said in a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange yesterday.

At 10:50am on Thursday, the companies detected that their systems were becoming strained from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, with online services slowing to a crawl due to spiking network bandwidth usage.

First Securities said that although its online services had slowed, its electronic trading systems had remained operational during the attack.     [FULL  STORY]