DOWO

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced yesterday that it had fined Carphone Warehouse £400 000 over a cyber-attack in 2015.  The company’s failure to secure the system allowed unauthorised access to the personal data of over three million customers and 1,000 employees, including: names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, marital status and payment card details.  […]

There appears to have been a big rise in the number of organisations certifying to the Cyber Essentials standard over the last three months.  Data from the four certifying bodies in August 2017 revealed that nearly 4600 organisations were certified at that stage, but this has now risen to over 5500; an increase of more […]

At first glance the announcement of a data breach involving data from 57 million drivers and customers of Uber is a case of more of the same: there have been much bigger breaches over the last few years.  However, the revelation that the company didn’t acknowledge the breach for a year, opting instead to pay […]

The BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report has become an invaluable source of information for both resilience and supply chain professionals over the last few years.  The release of the 2017 report this week brings the picture right up to date. In many ways this year’s report confirms the patterns seen in previous years: 65% of […]

I came across a fascinating article recently by Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra entitled “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy”.  The authors reconciled local data from across the US on government spending on various aspects of disaster preparedness and disaster relief, with election results in each area.  Their key finding was that politicians were rewarded, […]

We are now becoming so used to data breaches that only the most spectacular example receive much attention.  Usually they are spectacular because of the sheer volume of data, such as the Yahoo! breach of 2013; but on this occasion the newsworthy feature of the attacks is the sensitivity of the data that was compromised. […]

According to the Business Continuity Institute’s (BCI) inaugural Information Security Report, 15% of organisations “lost sensitive data” in the last 12 months. Indeed the actual figure could be higher, as a further 15% don’t know if they did or didn’t. Whatever the precise figure, it is broadly in line with a report from IBM in […]

The Chairman and CEO of Equifax yesterday became the latest executive to “retire” in the wake of the enormous data breach announced on 7th September; the CIO and CSO having already “retired” two weeks ago.  The previous “retirements” coincide with the bottoming out of a steep fall in share price (roughly 33% or $5b) following […]

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the results of their 2016 survey last week and there are big rises in the number of certifications for both ISO 22301 and ISO 27001. By the end of 2016 there were a total of 3853 organizations globally certified to ISO 22301, a rise of 23% from 2015. […]

I have really enjoyed this new book from Anthony Fitzsimmons and Derek Atkins, and would thoroughly recommend it to all those with an interest in risk management. The title is actually somewhat misleading, suggesting a narrow focus on reputation management; whereas the book actually takes a very broad look at a wide variety of behavioural […]