New Zealand under 'unprecedented' cyber attack

New Zealand’s justice minister says the nation is confronting cyber attacks on an unprecedented scale, targeting everything from the stock market to the weather service.

Andrew Little said tracking down the perpetrators of attacks in recent weeks would be extremely difficult, as the distributed denial of service attacks are being routed through thousands of computers.

One line of investigation is the e-mails sent to people in some of the targeted organizations demanding a ransom in exchange for stopping the attacks, the minister said. The official advice is to never, ever pay a ransom.

Little said he’s been told that the sheer volume of data used by the attackers is unprecedented. New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, is helping with the investigation and working to protect companies targeted in what it says appears to be part of a global campaign.

The attacks stopped share trading for up to several hours at a time over four days last week.

Private company NZX, which hosts the market, said it halted trading to maintain market integrity because the attacks prevented it from publishing market announcements.

Little said the attacks were a wake-up call to all organizations with customer-facing websites. Only a few organizations seem to have been targeted at any one time and most have been able to repel the attacks, giving him confidence the country can move past them.