Massive virus attacks on over 120 brokerage houses' server systems yesterday forced the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) to suspend stock trading for almost the whole day.

Till filing of this report at 9 pm yesterday, DSE teams were working to get the systems restored. They were using anti-virus software Kaspersky to clean the infected servers .

DSE Chief Executive Officer said an investigation will be launched to find out whether the virus attack was an act of any organised crime.

Trading meanwhile took place on the premier bourse for only one hour at the later part of the day.

“We are working hard to get the server systems back in order and we hope we can complete the job tonight [yesterday night],” said ASM Khairuzzaman, chief technical officer of DSE.

So far five types of viruses were detected: cool_gamesetup.exe, golf_game.exe, suchost.exe, iiiiii.exe and backdoor.win32.hupigon.crch.

Khairuzzaman said all servers are Windows-based, which are quite vulnerable to viruses . “Regular upgradation of anti-virus software is needed to check virus,” he said.

“However, we will search for the actual reasons later, as our prime target now is to restart the servers,” he said.

Market insiders have attributed the virus attacks to use of pirated versions of Windows by many small brokers.

The viruses emerged on Monday evening and on the following day, Tuesday, when some brokerages houses faced trouble in their trading and clearing and settlement activities.

At 12 noon trading started as 165 brokers out of 195 logged in with the DSE main server. But, just after 2 minutes, more than 120 brokerage firms were logged off from the main server due to massive virus attacks.

“We could not continue the trading as number of members came down to below 65, the quorum for trading,” said DSE CEO.

Later, at 2pm the trading started with around 150 brokerage houses.


By Sarwar A Chowdhury



Original Article

This entry was posted by Sean Cannon on Thursday, July 10. 2008 at 09:04. and is filed under Adware, Spyware and Trojans.