The China Post
Date: September 23, 2016
By: The China Post news staff
TAIPEI, Taiwan — First Securities (第一金證券) was blackmailed on Thursday by hackers who threatened to completely disable its trading system with DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.
The hackers asked the brokerage firm to pay 50 bitcoins (approximately NT$940,000), in an email that they sent to First Securities at around 10 a.m. on Thursday.
Local newspaper Apple Daily cited an unnamed source as saying that a DDoS attack came at around 11 a.m., stopping all electronic trades.
First Securities President Yeh Kuang-chang (葉光章) confirmed that they received the blackmail email but stressed that the firm’s trading system was only slowed down but not disabled by the attacks as reported. The firm has activated a reserve system and, while a small number of investors were affected by the attacks, the system was not paralyzed, Yeh said. He said he believed the situation would be resolved by Friday. [FULL STORY]