Lincolnshire CC ransom demand.

Mikinton

Mikinton

Well-Known Forumite
wmrcomputers said:
Lincolnshire CC are "hoping" that their systems will be up and running next week..... really? You're backups weren't of a type that could be restored in literally just hours??? Shame on you.

<end of rant>
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I'm sure their key systems will be up and running within hours. Many of the lower priority ones will take longer for a variety of reasons, the availability of technical and human resources being one of them. It depends what systems they run themselves and which of their own systems are under threat. Social Care will be very near the top as there are lives at risk. Email will be up there too. CRM and SRM are less important; whilst it's important to pay creditors and receive payments, there are ways round it in an emergency. Payroll? It depends on the cycle. If the pay date is weeks away, then you've got some breathing space. If it's tomorrow, you might have to tell the bank to pay them what you paid them last month and sort out the mess later. Corporate accounting may not be in itself be that important, but as it tends to bind everything else together, it'll be restored with the rest of the financials. And of course you need staff to go through their checklists to make sure it's all gone back OK, which takes hours even when you know what changes have been made to a system. Getting the website up will be important politically, and probably a quick win. Libraries may have to resort to manual procedures for while and may suspend them all together (good news if your library book is overdue). And last of all is the IT department's time recording system - how are they going to cost up all that overtime?

The problem is not that a system can't be restored within hours. It's just that there are so many of them all wanting the same technical resources at the same time. DR will have been taken seriously (one hopes), but at the end of the day, it's not like a bank and there's not the urgency to get everything back a.s.a.p. They'll understand the risks and will have a cost effective [strategy] in place .... one hopes.
 
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United57

United57

Well-Known Forumite
Not wishing to offend local government IT people it may pay to bring in some of the bigger security companies to look at what they do. Most local government IT teams seem well established in other words they have been there for years. There skills are not at the top because if they were its very unlikely they would have stayed because the lure of gold elsewhere would have taken them elsewhere.
 
proactive

proactive

Enjoying a drop of red.
United57 said:
Not wishing to offend local government IT people it may pay to bring in some of the bigger security companies to look at what they do. Most local government IT teams seem well established in other words they have been there for years. There skills are not at the top because if they were its very unlikely they would have stayed because the lure of gold elsewhere would have taken them elsewhere.
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The size of IT security is unimportant. It's competence that matters.
 
Mikinton

Mikinton

Well-Known Forumite
United57 said:
Not wishing to offend local government IT people it may pay to bring in some of the bigger security companies to look at what they do.
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I used to work in the County Council's IT section, initially in the application development area, then more recently in the server etc area. I'm now retired.

Whilst I didn't get that close to computer security, I suspect that those that work in that area will have built a relationship with one of "the bigger security companies" and that there'll be a regular review process in place. Certainly the area I worked in had an annual review by our external auditors (and a right pain in the arse they were as well). One thing they did pull us up on in the late 1990s .... we used to run an AV product called Invircible. Never heard of it? No, I guess there won't be many that have. It worked well, was fairly cheap, didn't require much support and didn't leave too big a footprint on our systems. But because it wasn't one of the big AV names around at the time, we were advised to ditch it in favour of one of those big names, which we did (I forget which one). But, yeah .... computer auditors will do their reviews, make their recommendations, set out the action points and the council will attend to them (or not if what's being asked for is unreasonable).
 
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