While the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) continues to do simulations to determine why its network was down for nearly a whole day last week, the bourse`s CIO is adamant it was not hacked.
This morning, Riaan van Vamelen denied the bourse`s disaster recovery (DR) site was hacked, which would make it unfeasible for the JSE to fail over to it.
"We do have duel data feeds and a DR site, but the problem affected the DR site as well," says Van Vamelen.
Last Monday, a network error caused the JSE to experience nearly an entire day of downtime. Instead of the normal R12 billion of trade volumes, it only saw about R5 billion, a knock of R7 billion, even though trading hours were extended to 7pm.
Van Vamelen says the JSE has been recreating the situation that led to the multi-cast data-feed going down, as it has not yet been able to identity what triggered the event in the first place.
The feed originates in London. The bourse has been working with Cisco internationally since last week, and over the weekend, when it could import a lot of data and run simulations that could not be done in the limited test windows that were available during the trading week.
"If the problem was simple, we could easily recreate it, and we should not have been in that situation [where the system went down] in the first place," says Van Vamelen.
He says the network has been stable since the downtime and, while the JSE and Cisco have been able to run numerous simulations, these are only successful "up to a point".
Cisco has put a couple of options on the table as far as patches are concerned, he notes, but the bourse wants to be 100% sure it has solved the problem before it goes ahead with a solution.
Van Vamelen would not commit to a timeline for reporting back to the market in more detail as to what went wrong, but said this would happen eventually.
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