In the space of four months the government has published three things that, read side by side, tell rather different stories about the same risk. In July came the National Risk Register 2026. On 22 October the Cabinet Office launched Be Ready, asking every household to keep three days of supplies at home. And yesterday
The National Cyber Security Centre published its tenth Annual Review this morning, The State of the Cyber Nation, and I listened to the launch live. There were two speakers: Baroness Liz Lloyd, the Cyber Security Minister, and Dr Richard Horne, the NCSC’s chief executive. Between them they called on a supermarket fridge, the Leaning Tower
Wilfully blind? What the NCSC Annual Review 2026 asks of the rest of us Read More »
A deadline, not a software update On 31 January 2027, Openreach switches off the old copper phone network for good. No extensions this time. Openreach has been signalling this move for the best part of a decade, and it has just written to every communications provider on its network making one point very plainly: there
What the landline switch-off is really testing Read More »
This week, up to 600 GP practices across England and Wales lost their websites after the company that provided them went into administration. Patients can no longer use the online consultation forms. The chatbots and the FootFall online consultation platform have gone too, and some practices have warned that requests patients had already sent may
Hundreds of GP Websites Gone Overnight: What Supplier Insolvency Really Looks Like Read More »
A more sceptical read of the government’s new resilience campaign than the headlines gave it The instinct behind the government’s new Be Ready campaign is sound. A poll cited when the Deputy Prime Minister launched the underlying programme found only 15% of people have any kind of emergency kit, and more than 40% couldn’t manage
Be Ready — But For What, Exactly? Read More »
What this week’s internet-wide PHP scramble actually tests On Tuesday, the people who look after the software plumbing most of the web runs on had a bad day. Two critical flaws were found in PHP, the language that quietly powers something like seven or eight in every ten websites, including a huge chunk of the
Who’s Allowed to Pull the Plug? Read More »
The BCI’s latest research arrived with a confident covering email. The BCI Future of Resilience Report 2026, produced with the support of F24, describes “a profession on the verge of a significant transformation” and promises “the rise of the Chief Resilience Officer as a standard senior role”. Those are big claims about where our profession
When someone asks me what I do for a living, I usually take a breath before answering. Business continuity, crisis management, information security, data protection, emergency planning, exercising, training…. People’s eyes start to glaze over somewhere around the third item, and I can see them filing me under “something in IT” or “health and safety,
Defrosted overnight: the French supermarket cyber attack and How it describes my job Read More »
On 8 September, a defect in the software that allocates radar identification codes to aircraft over the UK lasted, by NATS’ own account, a matter of milliseconds. Controllers lost the ability to tell which blip on their screens belonged to which flight without switching to manual coordination, and restrictions went on across the whole of
The Fault Lasted a Millisecond. The Recovery Took Days. Read More »
This week produced three AI stories that look separate but aren’t. Anthropic’s own alignment lead put a number on AI wiping out humanity: a chance he personally puts at more than 10% within the next decade. The company’s latest Threat Intelligence Report disclosed that it has spent the months since December 2025 detecting and blocking
