NZX : New Zealand's stock exchange hit by second cyber attack

Trading on New Zealand's stock exchange was halted for several hours on Wednesday after what appeared to be a second offshore cyber attack in as many days, bourse operator NZX Ltd said.

The cyber attack was similar to one late on Tuesday, the bourse said, where its network provider faced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack - a common way to disrupt a server by overwhelming the infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic until they can no longer cope with the scale of data requested.

NZX said cash market trading was halted at 11:24 a.m. local time (2324 GMT) on Wednesday and resumed at 3:00 p.m. Trading in the final hour on Tuesday was also affected.

The NZX website and markets announcement platform were also impacted.

"NZX's network provider continues to investigate the source of the issue. We will provide further information once available," the company said in an emailed statement.

(Reporting by Nikhil Kurian Nainan, A K Pranav and Rushil Dutta in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Rashmi Aich)