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.”