Hong Kong stock exchange website hacked
The chief executive of the Hong Kong stock exchange has said that a website outage that took place earlier today appears to have been "the result of a malicious attack by outside hacking", the Financial Times has reported.
At first, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd (HKEx) attributed the outage simply to "technical problems". It reassured customers that its trading platform had not been affected.
As a precautionary measure, the company suspended trading of shares in companies that were due to make significant announcements on the website during the day. These included HSBC and HKex itself, which reported its financial results shortly after the outage. CEO Charles Li made the hacking claim during the company's results presentation. Like many high profile organisations, stock exchanges are reportedly targeted by hackers on a frequent basis.
