How resilient is the UK?
Sungard's Keith Tilley asks how resilient is the UK and how it compares with its neighbours?
The most obvious worry for UK resilience is what many see as an over-reliance on London. The capital serves as the UK's networking hub; all domestic and international carriers have a substantial presence in the city. Clearly, the reliance on London to play such a pivotal role in providing communication means that any localised disruption such as flooding, power cuts or terrorist attacks, and so on, could have a substantial impact on the UK's ability to operate amongst businesses. Furthermore, weather events continue to be a perennial issue for the UK. The UK's persistent inability to deal wi… More…
City simulates cyber attacks
Detica's Henry Harrison describes the industry-wide acknowledgement of how high cyber risk has climbed up the priority list for financial institutions, when the FSA, Bank of England and Treasury teamed up to create a simulated cyber attack exercise for the UK's banks.
The lengthy list of high profile public and private sector organisations falling victim to cyber crime keeps on growing, and given the reliance of the UK's critical national infrastructure on cyber space, one certainty this year is that organisations' exposure to cyber threats is going to increase. Given the potential damage they are capable of inflicting, cyber attacks necessitate new approaches to assessing impact and managing risk, which is why it's encouraging to see the financial services sector take a lead with its simulated cyber attack. We must now hope that other sectors will follow… More…
The future is white
Andrew Fell from TTP looks at how the white space spectrum could improve emergency services communications.
With emergency services demanding more communications capacity, cellular infrastructures often struggle to cope with the sheer weight of traffic when it is most required. In UK and Europe there is simply not enough spectrum available for the emergency services to support the large amounts of data transfer required during a major incident. But things could change with the development of new white space technology that could provide long range, fast data communications between blue light services. Current trials suggest that white space could deliver applications such as on-scene high definiti… More…
Hackers chasing gold at London's Olympics
While the influx of tourists will strain London's transport system when it hosts the 2012 Olympics, Carl Leonard, security expert at Websense, is more worried about an increase in cybercrime as hackers seek to exploit the Games.
Cybercriminals are well practiced at exploiting hot topics. They look at what is popular and trending and use it to lure unsuspecting victims. They target personal devices, personal media use and personal web activities to create advanced, social engineering attacks to gain access. And this year's Olympic Games offers hackers a host of opportunities to do just this. Opportunities they can then use to infiltrate the machines or capture the personal data of an interested public. The malware tactics they deploy can be as simple as direct emails featuring bogus offers. Alternatively, they may us… More…
