Stock brokers like Upstox, or mainly those who provide online or app-based trading services, restricted positions based on margin trading facility (MTF) to their clients on Monday, as India’s largest depository player CDSL was faced with a cyber attack on Friday.

The back-office operations of brokers were disrupted after CDSL shut its systems last week and it had some spill-over impact on a few brokerage services on Monday too, market players said.

Most online or app-based brokers have CDSL as their depository service provider. MTF lets traders buy stocks with just 50 per cent of their own funds, while the rest is provided by the broker. On Friday, brokers said services such as pay-in, pay-out, pledge, or unpledged securities for margin were down due to system shutdown at CDSL.

Malware impact

CDSL had suspended its trading operations for two days after it found malware in its systems last Friday. A CDSL official said that they had shut down their servers to safeguard the markets from contagion-like effect. The official further said that all the systems were tested several times before bringing them online.

On Sunday, CDSL said it had restored its systems and a settlement was carried out. However, some of the brokers were cautious and suspended MTF positions since it requires real-time calculations and also due to the backlog of last week’s pending positions, experts said. Upstox had sent out messages to its clients about the suspension of the MTF facility, market players told businessline.

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