News

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 […]

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 […]