Cyberattack on ION Trading UK sends derivatives trading back to 1980s

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. 

Suddenly, in offices across the globe, traders and brokers turned to spreadsheets to keep track of their deals, firms resorted to inputting individual trades on websites provided by exchanges, and employees explained to