The Austerity Street CRASH

Yesterday, Saturday, I was subject to a cyber-attack – a piece of Malware had got onto my hard drive after visiting none other than the BBC football pages (the text stream of which hasn't worked since the “upgrade” some weeks ago) for news on the Chelsea match, Grrrrrr! I had to re-boot my system in “Safe mode” and do a system Restore to the week before. I wouldn’t mind but I have got Trend PC Cillin installed for protection. I might have to review that.

Which leads me on to the CRASH report. (CAST Report on Application Software Health) – don’t bother clicking on the link, you have to pay for their report. But there is some news coverage from the Europe Tech blog of the Wall Street Journal, how aposite!

And you thought it was just the World’s economic system that was suffering from the aftershock of a debt bubble! Wrong, there is also a computer code debt bubble – that is the cost of putting right all the crap code in Business applications as a result of cutting corners in the overpaid Chief Executive’s drive to maximise profit (and his bonus) at the expense of resilience and long term stability and security. If you thought that government sponsored Public Sector computer projects were bad, and they are, see Redbridge-i (faults reported months ago still not rectified), then this is where we are being led by the UK government’s drive to Marketise Public services. Facepalm!

But that’s not the half of it.

According to an email from Paul Maher at Positive Marketing and I presume he has read the report but I can’t find anything on this via a quick Google search (probably behind the paywall) ….

Energy and utility industries are in danger of significant failure according to data from the CRASH report, the largest study ever conducted on the quality of software applications. This comes at a time when the level and ferocity of cyber-attacks on national infrastructure is at an all-time high, with energy and utility companies being targeted in particular.

The report’s findings may go some way to explaining the blackout that hit Soho last December on the busiest Friday of year, affecting over 100 local businesses and costing some upwards of £10,000 each. With shops being forced to cease trading and Oxford Circus, the second busiest tube station in London, being left without power maybe this is a taste of things to come if software security issues are overlooked.

The CRASH report showed that a high number of applications in the energy and utility sector had structural quality violations, which leave them vulnerable in terms of outages, performance degradation, breaches by unauthorized users and data corruption.

And still our ConDem government pander to their paymasters, the big 6 energy companies, amongst others, and do all they can to dampen down and prevent emerging distributed energy generation projects from taking an equally subsidized share of the market.

Never, in human history, was the need for Agenda 21 and Transition more apparent, but only if you have eyes that see.