Trading 212, the London based broker and fintech company, suffered a DDOS attack this week.
The FCA-regulated forex and CFD broker announced on Tuesday that its trading platform was under distributed denial-of-service attacks, (DDOS)
The attack was believed to have lasted just an hour and normal service was resumed very quickly. The company announced on Twitter that the third-party protection service was not working properly. There was a small breakdown in connections and users were prevented from logging into their accounts.
DDOS Attacks a Growing Threat in Financial Services
DDOS attacks are not uncommon in the financial services industry. NZX, the only registered securities exchange in New Zealand, suffered from DDoS attacks in August this year. The high profile attack was so severe that the perpetrators managed to take the NSX platform completely down for almost a full trading week.
Financial services firms have become an increasingly prominent target for DDOS attacks by economically and ideologically motivated criminals.
According to research by F5 Labs earlier this year, DDoS attacks were the second biggest threat to financial services organisations after hacks, but the fastest growing threat. DDOS attacks accounted for 32% of all reported incidents between 2017 and 2019. In 2017, 26% of attacks on financial services organisations focused on DDoS. In 2019, the figure jumped to 42%.
“As the world becomes increasingly connected, more defenses are required to protect against the bombardment of attempts to take down a site,” said Jake Moore, cybersecurity specialist at ESET.
“DDoS attacks are common threats that can usually be avoided with the correct mitigation techniques,” said Moore. “However, when a site experiences a massive influx of traffic that it is not prepared for, even huge organisations can be knocked off their feet relatively easily – and for long periods of time.”
