Hong Kong Exchanges Denies Report of Printer Hacking Attack
Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. (BNWEXCH), the second-largest bourse operator by market value, said errors at a printer, not hackers, were behind the erroneous filing of three documents under the wrong companies’ tickers on Sunday.
Lijun International Pharmaceutical Holding Ltd. (2005) and Natural Dairy (462) N.Z. Holdings Ltd. remained suspended today after the error, which saw Lijun’s first-half financial data wrongly released and documents relating to a takeover of G-Prop Holdings Ltd. (286) published under Natural Dairy’s ticker. A printing firm hired by the companies uploaded the wrong information by mistake, the bourse’s head of corporate communications Henry Law said, denying a report in the South China Morning Post newspaper that hackers were suspected.
Exchanges and their trading systems are under scrutiny globally after computer errors halted transactions on parts of the Tokyo Stock Exchange twice this year and after an automatic- trading malfunction drove Knight Capital Group to the brink of bankruptcy. Hong Kong Exchanges suffered two days of attacks on its website by hackers almost exactly one year before Sunday’s error.
