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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 […]

The October 2015 data breach at TalkTalk, resulting in the theft of personal data of almost 157,000 customers and a record £400 000 fine, has been widely reported  here and elsewhere.  However, another serious breach has not been so widely reported. TalkTalk began investigating in September 2014, after receiving complaints from customer that they were […]

The Hull-based telecoms firm, KCOM, has been fined £900k by Ofcom over a failure of their 999 call service back in December 2015.  The 4-hour outage resulted in 74 emergency calls failing, so the fine equates to over £10 000 per call (or £225k per hour)!  Although Ofcom accepted that the root cause of the […]

Last week attention was drawn once again to BA’s major IT outage back in May, which left tens of thousands of passengers stranded; when their owner, IAG, announced its half-year results.  There were various predictions of the cost of the disruption around the £100m mark at the time of the incident, but IAG announced that […]

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released its 2016/17 annual report on 13th July, which showed another steep rise in the number of data protection incidents. There were a total of 2565 self-reported data protection incidents in 2016/17, an increase of over 30% from the previous year. Once again the top sectors, by number of incidents, […]

Just over 1 month on from the WannaCry attack, there have been reports about a significant ransomware attack on University College London.  The attacks impacted shared drives, with detailed instructions given out on the university website.  By 2.30pm on 16th June, users were told that the ‘first phase of share folders will come back online this […]

Well, another Business Continuity Awareness Week comes to an end.  This year’s theme has been Cyber Resilience and, given the world-wide problems with WannaCry, it has certainly been a topical theme! Today’s story looks more towards business continuity in a more traditional setting, and considers the implications that need to be considered for large-scale changes […]

A quick summary of the cyber news today, and it is clear that the same key lessons are emerging as have already been noted this week.  Indian restaurant guide, Zomato, is reporting the theft of data of some 17 million users.  From the phrasing in their blog, it appears that they have just found the breach, […]

There has understandably been much focus, over the last few days, on information security in the NHS.  Whilst there is still no suggestion that any patient data was breached in the recent ransomware incident, breaches of patient data remain a global problem within the healthcare sector: over 30 million patient records were breached in the […]

Hot on the heels of the massive ransomware attack on 12 May 2017, reports are emerging of ransomware attack on Disney.  Unlike the Wannacry attack, which has impacted over 200,000 computers in 150 countries, the Disney attack has been deliberately targeted, with hackers threatening to release segments of the new Pirates of the Caribbean film […]