Taiwan's government condemns cyberattacks on TWSE, DGBAS, financial firms

Taipei, Sept. 13 (CNA) Taiwan's Executive Yuan on Friday strongly condemned cyberattacks suspected to have been launched by a pro-Russia hacking group targeting the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE), the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS), and several local financial institutions the previous day.

In addition to the condemnation, the Executive Yuan, Taiwan's top administrative organ, assured the public that government agencies are closely monitoring the situation and have a firm understanding of the incident.

In a statement, Cabinet spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) said the Executive Yuan strongly condemned reckless hacking attacks on countries including Taiwan, which caused serious troubles in the region.

Lee said that Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君), who also heads the National Information and Communication Security Taskforce, has required the Administration of Cyber Security (ACS) under the Ministry of Digital Affairs to closely grasp relevant information about the cyberattacks and help every agency to make prompt responses.

While the government will continue to monitor how the cyberattacks will evolve, Lee said, it has also informed all of the agencies under the central and local governments that they should work together to defend themselves from possible attacks in the future.

Lee said the Cabinet will keep instructing the national security agencies to provide necessary assistance to take on international cyberattacks in a bid to maintain cybersecurity in the country.

The statement was issued after the websites of the TWSE, the DGBAS, and several major government-invested Taiwanese banks including Mega Financial Holding Co. and Chang Hwa Commercial Bank, crashed due to cyberattacks on Thursday.

NoName057, a pro-Russia hacker, has claimed that it launched distributed denial of service, or DDoS attacks on Taiwan's government agencies, financial firms and even the Taipei Songshan Airport.

The ACS confirmed Thursday that the attacks were made through DDoS, referring to a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure.

The ACS said due to its special political status, Taiwan has been long term a target by cyberattacks from overseas, but it has kept exchanging information with other countries about cyberattacks in a bid to maintain cyber security in Taiwan.

According to the TWSE, at around 3 p.m. Thursday, the exchange found a large number of foreign IPs launched invalid queries on its network, causing unstable services for a short period of time.

Through a prompt response to the incident, the TWSE said its global website returned to normal at 3:22 p.m. and saw no impact on its operations as well as the local stock market.

Mega Financial said the websites of the firm and its securities, commercial bill and securities investment trust subsidiaries were attacked by DDoS Thursday afternoon, but the networks returned to normal soon after their quick responses to the attacks.

NoName057 is the pro-Russian hacktivist group behind Project DDoSia, a DDoS attack toolkit, that targets entities criticizing the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and supporting Ukraine.

Local media cited global cyber security, application delivery solutions provider Radware as saying that the attacks from NoName057 came in retaliation for the comments made by President Lai Ching-te (賴清德), who said on Sept. 1 that China views Taiwan as part of its territory and has never renounced the use of force against the island.

"If it is really about territorial integrity, why don't they [China] take back the land that was signed away and occupied by Russia in the Treaty of Aigun?" Lai said. "Now Russia is at its weakest. [The land in] the Treaty of Aigun, you [China] could have asked for it back, but you [China] didn't."

The Treaty of Aigun was signed in 1858 between the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty which ceded around 600,000 square kilometers of land in Manchuria to Russia.