Security News > 2020 > August > Spooks Called in as Cyberattacks Again Halt NZ Stock Exchange
New Zealand's spy agency has been brought in to help fight back against cyberattacks that crippled the country's stock exchange for a fourth straight day on Friday.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson said the Government Communications Security Bureau intelligence agency had joined efforts to contain the threat, which market operator NZX claimed was foreign-sourced but provided no further details.
"Ministers have asked the GCSB to assist, and the National Cyber Security Centre within the GCSB are assisting."
Rizwan Asghar, of Auckland University's school of computer science, said 'denial of service' attacks, which bombard systems with data requests or traffic, occurred regularly but were usually contained by the target's security systems.
He said the NZX outages showed the need for governments to build proper security into critical infrastructure systems before cyberattacks occurred.