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Clearly the news from China over the last few days of the emergence and spread of Coronavirus has been very worrying.  The news today that patients in Scotland are being tested for Coronavirus make the threat all the more stark.  Reliable data on infection rates, and severity of the disease is impossible to come by […]

A report published recently by DLA Piper looks at the impact of GDPR, 18 months on from coming into force across the EU.  So far 160 000 breaches have been reported, including: 40 000 in the Netherlands; 37 000 in Germany; and 22 000 in the UK. The report states that the fines imposed to […]

There is a strong sense of “situation no change” as the 2020s began with three high-profile IT problems in the UK Financial Services Sector. Firstly, the on-line banking services and mobile apps for Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland (all part of the Lloyds Banking Group) were all disrupted on New Year’s Day.  The disruption […]

We have blogged repeatedly (most recently in June 2019) about the problems that Whirlpool has experienced with their long-running recall of tumble dryers.  Now, unbelievably, they have announced a recall of half a million washing machines and within the first 24 hours there have been “technical problems” with the recall website.  Unsurprisingly this has driven […]

The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) published their latest Supply Chain Resilience Report earlier this month.  Now in its eleventh year,  the 2019 report very much confirms the patterns seen in previous years: Excluding organisations who were not sure if they had experienced a disruption(!); 67% of respondent organisations experienced one or more supply chain disruptions in […]

You couldn’t make it up: only days after the publication of a highly critical report into a massive IT failure in April 2018, TSB experienced further IT problems last week.  Customers started noticing delays to payments arriving in their accounts on Thursday.  TSB attributed the delays to a “processing error”, and advised that this had […]

My attention was captured yesterday by an interview on the Radio 4 Today Programme with the CEO of National Grid.  In the course of explaining the background to the widespread power outages last Friday, he first described the almost simultaneous loss of two producers of this scale as “rare, unique” and later as “pretty unique”.  […]

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today issued a notice of its intention to fine British Airways £183.39M for infringements of GDPR.  The proposed record-breaking fine relates to a well-publicised cyber incident in 2018, wherein user traffic to the British Airways website was diverted to a fraudulent site.  Personal data of approximately 500,000 customers were affected […]

According to a recent report by Forrester Research, ransomware attacks on businesses are up 500% on last year!  The report also states that many firms have felt obliged to pay ransoms, as attackers have become more sophisticated in targeting backups; indeed it states that paying a ransom can ‘be a valid recovery option based on […]