Russian stock exchange hit by virus attack

Russian stock exchange hit by virus attack

The Russian Trading System was forced to stop functioning for around an hour after the computer systems at the exchange were hit by a massive virus attack. The virus attack affected three different markets: the FORTS derivatives market, the Classic, and the T+0 market and they were closed for trading between 1615 to 1720 MST on Thursday.

RTS spokesperson Larisa Gorbunova said in a statement to a US based media group confirming the virus attack: “Trading on our exchange was halted for a while but the glitch was fixed pretty fast.” They have not revealed more details on what virus attacked the system.

Dmitry Shatsky, vice-president of the RTS added his views on this event: “The infected computer started to generate tremendous amounts of false traffic, causing the RTS routers to overload. As a result, the ‘work’ traffic — data being entered into the trading system — was not processed. RTS experts took a series of measures to prevent similar virus attacks in the future.”