"City of London on High Alert After Ransomware Attack"

A suspected ransomware attack on a key supplier of trading software to the City of London this week appears to have disrupted activity in the derivatives market.  Ion Cleared Derivatives released a brief statement on Tuesday saying that it experienced a “cybersecurity event” that day, which affected some of its services.  The company stated that the incident is contained to a specific environment, all the affected servers are disconnected, and remediation of services is ongoing.  Reports suggest the attack has impacted 42 clients of the provider, whose software plays a key role in derivatives trading worldwide.  The attack has been linked to the prolific Lockbit group, which recently caused major disruption to the Royal Mail.  Trade body the Futures Industry Association (FIA) said in a statement on Wednesday that it was aware of “network issues” caused by a cyber incident at Ion that had impacted the trading and clearing of exchange traded derivatives worldwide.  The FIA stated that they were working with impacted members, including clearing firms and exchanges, as well as market regulators and others, to assess the extent of the impact on trading, processing, and clearing.  Tim West, head of cyber-threat intelligence at WithSecure, said supply chain attacks like this can have major repercussions for critical sectors such as finance.  West noted that the financial system has a terrible number of interdependencies, and a major incident at a single big enough institution can amplify and result in a pretty impactful butterfly effect across the sector.

Infosecurity reports: "City of London on High Alert After Ransomware Attack"