Cyberattack Sends Derivatives Trading Back to the 1980s
- Shops clearing trades were forced to process deals manually
- Incident highlights importance of a little known software firm
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Derivatives shops, used to clearing hundreds of billions of dollars in trades every day, found themselves in a dramatically different era this week: the old days of manually processing deals.
Early Tuesday morning in Europe, a little known but critically important software company that underpins the smooth functioning of stock, bond and commodities markets started to seize up. London-based ION Trading UK had succumbed to a cyberattack.