The Bank of England has issued the following statement:
“Following concerns raised with the Bank, we have recently identified that an audio feed of certain of the Bank press conferences - installed only to act as a back-up in case the video feed failed - has been misused by a third party supplier to the Bank since earlier this year to supply services to other external clients. This wholly unacceptable use of the audio feed was without the Bank’s knowledge or consent, and is being investigated further.
On identifying this, the Bank immediately disabled the third party supplier’s access. As a result, the third party supplier did not have any access to the most recent press conference and will no longer play any part in any of the Bank’s future press conferences
The Bank operates the highest standards of information security around the release of the market sensitive decisions of its policy committees. The issue identified related only to the broadcast of press conferences that follow such statements.”