A man walks past a screen displaying stock market curves outside the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taipei on May 12, 2021.
SAM YEH | AFP via Getty Images
Pro-Russian hackers are believed to have taken down the website of the Taiwan Stock Exchange on Thursday, local media reported.
At 3:00 p.m. Taiwan time, stock exchange said “A large number of foreign IPs made invalid queries” on its network, leading to “unstable service for a short period of time”.
The network returned to normal at 3:22 p.m. local time. The exchange added that the stock market and related businesses were “operating normally without any impact.” Taiwan markets closed at 1:30 p.m. local time.
While the exchange did not specify the cause of the attack or the perpetrator of the attack, local media reported It was part of a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack against the Taiwanese government by a pro-Russian hacker group.
The attack is believed to have targeted Taiwan’s government and financial institutions, including the airport and tax bureau.
The Taipei Times reported Cybersecurity firm Radware said the attack was carried out in retaliation for comments made by Taiwanese President William Lai.
On September 1, Lai said in an interview that China’s claims to Taiwan are about changing the rules-based international order and achieving hegemony in the Western Pacific rather than territorial claims.
China considers Taiwan part of its territory and has not renounced the use of force against the island.
“It wants to achieve hegemony on the international stage, in the Western Pacific — that’s its real goal,” Lai said.
“If it is really a matter of territorial integrity, why don’t they take back the land that Russia signed and occupied in the Aigun Treaty?” Lai said.
“Russia is at its weakest point right now,” he added. [The land in] Aigun Treaty, you [China] could have asked for it back, but he didn’t.”
The Treaty of Aigun of 1858 was a treaty between the Qing dynasty—the last dynasty of China—and the Russian Empire, ceding approximately 600,000 square kilometers of land in Manchuria to Russia.
The Qing initially refused to ratify the treaty before confirming its termination in the 1860 Convention of Peking, which China viewed as one of many “unequal treaties”.
In 1895, Taiwan was also ceded to Japan in another “unequal treaty”, known as the Treaty of Shimonoseki, before being placed under the control of the then Republic of China – Taiwan’s official name – in 1945 after World War II.
