WELLINGTON: Cyber attacks forced New Zealand’s stock exchange to halt trading Thursday for the third time in as many days, its operator said Thursday, just as the country’s corporate reporting season gets underway.

The New Zealand Exchange (NZX) said the bourse was placed into a trading halt at about 11.10am local time “as a result of network connectivity issues relating to DDoS cybersecurity attacks”.

A distributed denial of service attack — commonly known as a “dee-dos” or DDoS —- involves disrupting computer networks by flooding them with traffic. Temporary trading halts were ordered as a result, he added, with the market down from 3.57pm to 5.00pm Tuesday and again from 11.24pm to 3.00pm Wednesday, a spokesman told AFP.—