News

Fifteen years ago today, at 6am on Sunday 11th December 2005, the largest ever explosion and fire in peacetime Western Europe took place at the Buncefield Oil Storage Depot in Hemel Hempstead.  Miraculously there were no fatalities, and only 60 casualties; but in every other sense the impact of the incident was huge.  Summarising some […]

Whilst the news that Manchester United had been hit by a “sophisticated operation by organized cyber criminals” was widely reported on Saturday, little detail has emerged since.  In particular, there has been no update to the club’s original statement that “We are not currently aware of any breach of personal data associated with our fans […]

Published in 2020 and 2019 respectively, these books are both very timely as we have all had to get to grips with epidemiology.  Whilst there are hopeful signs that we may be close to finding a way out of the current Covid-19 pandemic; the threat of future pandemics remains very real. As the name suggests […]

On the evening of 18th of November 1987, 31 people died and many more were injured in a terrible fire in Kings Cross Underground station.  As always in these blog posts, we should firstly remember the victims and the many others who were affected by the incident.  Whilst the most obvious “cause” of the tragedy […]

We have often blogged about IT incidents within the banking sector and commented upon the frequency of these events; but how common are they?  Since April 2018, UK banks have had to report “Operational and Security Incidents” affecting personal and business current accounts to the FCA if they reach any of the following thresholds: > […]

There hasn’t been a high-profile food product recall in the UK since the fatal listeria contamination at Good Food Chain/North Country Cooked Meats over a year ago.  Overall it has been a pretty quiet time for the sector, but food recalls hit the headlines again yesterday when Diageo announced a recall of its new alcohol-free […]

On 6th November 2004 the 17:35 Paddington to Penzance train was derailed when it struck a parked car on a level crossing at Ufton Nervet, near Reading.  Tragically the car driver, train driver and four passengers died at the scene; whilst another passenger died a few hours later in hospital.  Fortunately though, this was the […]

Following hot on the heels of the announcement of a £20m fine for BA, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a final penalty of £18.4m on Marriott International last Friday.  Once again, this has been a long-running saga including, as with BA, the proposal last year of a much larger fine of £99m.  It also brings […]

The long-running saga of the BA data breach reached its conclusion (probably) last week with the announcement by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of a £20m fine.  Initial comments focused on the huge reduction from the £183m fine that the ICO initially proposed last year; but this is still a significant fine, both in total […]

Twitter experienced a major outage last night, with tens of thousands of users around the world unable to use the platform for over an hour.  The issue appears to have been resolved now and Twitter have stressed that there is no evidence of a security breach; attributing the outage to an “inadvertent change” to their […]