A suspected ransomware attack against a major supplier of trading software in the City of London this week appears to have disrupted activity in the derivatives market.
Ion Cleared Derivatives issued a brief statement on Tuesday, saying a “cybersecurity event” occurred that day affecting some of its services.
“The incident has been limited to a specific environment, all affected servers have been disconnected and service repairs are in progress. Further updates will be posted as they become available,” it added.
According to reports, 42 clients were affected by attacks on software providers that play a key role in derivatives trading around the world. This is linked to his prolific Lockbit group, which recently caused a lot of havoc with the Royal Mail.
The futures industry association (FIA), the trading body, said in a statement Wednesday that “network issues” were caused by the cyber incident at Aeon that affected trading and clearing of derivatives traded on exchanges around the world. said to be aware of
“We are working with affected members, including clearing firms, exchanges and market regulators, to assess the extent of the impact on trading, processing and clearing,” it said.
“The FIA will use regular phone calls with interested parties to assess affected businesses, how they can work together to mitigate disruptions, and to clarify any regulatory obligations and reporting concerns affected. We are coordinating communication and information sharing.”
Tim West, head of cyber threat intelligence at WithSecure, said such supply chain attacks could have a significant impact on critical sectors such as finance.
“There are so many interdependencies in the financial system that a significant incident at a single, sufficiently large institution can be amplified, creating a fairly impactful butterfly effect across the sector,” he said. claimed.
“In an environment where trust in the financial system is critical, time is critical, and the entire technology sector exists to shave microseconds off operations, the expected disruption of service from a ransomware event is , could have significant ramifications beyond that of the services affected by the malware itself.”
