Security News > 2020 > January > GCHQ: A cyber-what-now? Rumours of our probe into London Stock Exchange 'cyberattack' have been greatly exaggerated
GCHQ and its cyber-defence offshoot NCSC have both denied that they are investigating a cyber-attack on the London Stock Exchange, contrary to reports.
"The incident," the newspaper claimed, "Which delayed the market open by more than an hour and a half and was the worst outage in eight years, immediately triggered government cyber alert systems, according to the people familiar with the matter."
The National Cyber Security Centre, GCHQ's cyber defence offshoot which normally does this sort of work during or after a cyber attack, told The Register: "The NCSC has not treated the LSE outage as a cyber security related incident and has not investigated it as such."
A spokeswoman for the eavesdropping agency added that GCHQ itself wasn't looking into the outage either.
Oddly, the WSJ doesn't include statements from GCHQ or NCSC, though it does quote an LSE spokeswoman who told the newspaper the outage was caused by a "Technical software configuration issue following an upgrade of functionality." She added that the LSE "Has thoroughly investigated the root cause of the issue to mitigate against any future incidents."