News

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 […]

According to the latest figures from the International Standards Organisation (ISO), covering the period up to the end of 2019, there have been significant increases in the number of certifications to ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 globally: Unfortunately no direct comparison is possible with earlier years as the basis of the survey was changed in […]

Donald Trump has been roundly criticised for his most recent comments downplaying the severity of Covid-19.  It appears that he has inferred from the fact that he appears to have had a mild form of the disease (although he is not out of the woods yet) that all Covid-19 infections are mild and there is […]

The National Cyber Security Centre has issued a specific alert to higher education institutions after a recent spike in attacks.  In particular, both Northumbria and Newcastle Universities have come under attack in the last few weeks.  These attacks come at the most critical time in the academic year, as universities recruit new students and prepare […]