As ever, it has been a busy start to Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) 2021…
Over the weekend, Santander in the UK suffered major technical issues affecting branch, telephone, online, app and card services. Sadly, according to figures compiled by the Financial Conduct Authority, this seems to be part of an ongoing problem, with Santander reporting 12 “Operational and Security Incidents” in the period July 2019 to June 2020 (the most of any bank). The bank are to be commended though for a swift recovery, all services were restored over the weekend; and maintaining good communications with customers via their website and social media throughout the incident. As we have blogged before, disruptions to banking services are often characterised by very poor communications.
Meanwhile, significant disruption to health services in Ireland continues, following the ransomware attack on the Health Service Executive last week. Yesterday it was reported that criminals had stolen 700GB of unencrypted data from the HSE’s IT systems and were demanding a ransom of $20 million to provide a decrypt tool and destroy the stolen data. The Irish Government has made it clear that they will not pay any ransom. Following hot on the heels of the recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, and numerous attacks on UK universities in recent weeks, cyber security is certainly going to be a major theme of BCAW 2021.