Company News

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 […]

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 […]