An IT glitch afflicting BP petrol stations for three hours last Sunday evening might not sound like headline news. A ten-hour meltdown of Visa card payment systems in June was a bigger story — as was the notorious TSB computer upgrade cock-up that started on 20 April, which was still afflicting customers a month later and was reported this week to be causing ruptures between TSB and its Spanish parent Sabadell.
Meanwhile, what do Fortnum & Mason, Dixons Carphone, Costa Coffee and its sister company Premier Inn have in common with various parts of the NHS? The answer is that they have all suffered recent large-scale ‘data breaches’ that may have put private individuals’ information at risk. IT Governance, a blog that monitors international news stories in this sphere, came up with a global figure of 145 million ‘records leaked’ last month alone. Such leaks are daily events everywhere — and a lesson of the TSB story was that cyber fraudsters are waiting to attack wherever private data becomes accessible, whether because of computer breakdown or lax data protection.
And here’s another angle. A recent report from GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre highlights the rapid growth of ‘business email compromise’ (BEC), in which the cyber fraudster impersonates a senior executive in order to coerce employees, customers or suppliers into transferring funds or revealing valuable information: ‘Industry experts project that global losses from BEC scams will exceed $9 billion in 2018.’ One victim last year was Dublin Zoo, where fraudsters diverted €500,000 by intercepting suppliers’ online invoices and changing their account details.
What’s my point? I wrote three years ago — in the context of a breach affecting customers of the mobile-phone operator TalkTalk, as well as fraud attempts on my own credit card and Facebook account — that we’re ‘only ever three clicks from anarchy’ in our reliance on internet links that are so vulnerable to villains.
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