Computer Virus Fells Russian Stock Exchange

Computer virus fells Russian stock exchange

http://www.newscientist.com/article....ine-news_rss20

Will Knight
18:01 03 February 2006

As the world waited for one computer virus to strike on Friday, another wriggled its way into the Russian stock exchange and knocked it offline.

Computer experts had warned that 3 February could bring gloom for many as a computer virus called Nyxem was scheduled to start deleting files on machines it had infected.

Nyxem is programmed to randomly delete Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents as well as pdf files, zip files and several other file types. The virus was released several weeks ago and has spread by forwarding itself to email addresses found on the computers it infects.

But widespread damage failed to materialise and by early evening UK time on Friday several anti-virus companies said they had received no reports of incidents involving Nyxem. Patches against the virus had been released on 16 January.

But a collective sigh of relief was tempered by news that the Russian stock exchange has been subjected to an attack instigated by an unnamed, and apparently unrelated, computer pest.

Specific hack
Dmitry Shatsky, vice president of the Russian Trading System (RTS) said in a statement that a virus had infected a single computer used to test trading software that was connected to the internet. The entire network had to be temporarily shut down on Thursday as experts sought to isolate the infected machine and scanned others PCs for signs of infection.

Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky said sources had revealed that the infected machine was controlled remotely to launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against other systems on the trading network.

This involves bombarding a system with huge amounts of irrelevant information in an attempt to bring it down.

"This seems to have been a specific hack attempt," David Emm, senior technology consultant at Kaspersky, told New Scientist. But it remains unclear whether the motive for the attack was extortion or simply vandalism.

"While all the world was in a frenzy over the damp squib that was Nyxem, this attack infiltrated the RTS and could have potentially given hackers access to their systems," adds Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for computer-security firm Sophos. "A virus which can disrupt a stock exchange can have obvious financial consequences, as well as harm the important credibility of an institution in the public's eye."