Beating IT Risks

Chapter 5. IT services

Under fire...

In February 2004 the SCO Group was the target of a denial of service attack linked to Mydoom, one of the fastest spreading email worms in history. The SCO website was rendered inaccessible and the site taken down. The company changed its domain name and moved to a new IP address. (AFR, 2004b)

On fire...

Bankstown City Council's Civic Centre was devastated by fire, the General Manager Mark Fitzgibbon completed an assessment of the damage, the response and the lessons. We extract the IT-related elements of the story:

For us the problem was that although we had the physical data files, we had nothing on which to run the data. Our mainframe was destroyed during the fire by smoke and water and there simply wasn't another machine like it in the country to read or convert the data. In fact we ended up having to import a second hand machine from France! Similarly we had to procure new file servers to recover a mountain of data contained on our office network such as all word processed documents.

(Fitzgibbon, 1998)

Closed for business...

Trading on the London Stock Exchange was disrupted for nearly eight hours by computer problems on Wednesday on what should have been one its busiest days of the year...

The tax year expired on Wednesday and it is usually one of the exchange's heaviest days as thousands of retail investors buy and sell shares for capital gains tax purposes. But the Inland Revenue said it would not extend the tax year by a day to compensate for ...