Cyberattack on Vietnam securities broker disrupts stock markets

Vietnam's third-largest securities broker, VNDirect, is still struggling to fully restore its operations after suffering a cyberattack over the weekend.

The company announced on Wednesday that some of its services are back online. However, according to local media reports, investors still couldn’t log in to the platform. VNDirect stated that it will restore access to its services in four stages, beginning with customer accounts and concluding with financial products. 

Because parts of the system have just been restored and the number of visitors is high, there could be problems with access to accounts, the company said in a statement on Facebook. “Please bear with us and reload the page another time,” it added. VNDirect’s website remains down as of late Wednesday local time.

The Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) announced it was temporarily disconnecting remote trading and online trading of derivative securities transactions, debt instrument transactions and individual corporate bond transactions by VNDirect “until the problem is resolved.”

VNDirect’s share price has fallen by nearly 4% since the start of the week, according to Reuters. On Monday, transaction volumes on another, larger Vietnamese market, the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange — abbreviated as HOSE or HSX — dropped by 10% as investors using VNDirect were unable to trade.

The vice chairman of Vietnam’s State Securities Commission (SSC) told Reuters that he doesn’t expect the attack to be “contagious” and that other local financial institutions are not at risk. He added that no other brokers had been affected by the hack.

Hanoi-based VNDirect holds the third-largest market share on the Ho Chi Minh City exchange, accounting for 7%. The company said that its “entire system was attacked by international hackers on Sunday,” but with no impact on customers' assets or data.

VNDirect’s CEO, Nguyen Vu Long, stated that the company was targeted “by a group of professional hackers” who encrypted data.

“We have successfully decrypted the blocked data and are now beginning the process of restoring the system,” he added.

Several companies associated with VNDirect, including the investment firm IPA and the stock investment fund IPAAM, were also under cyberattack, as reported by local media. Their websites are still down.