The Blackberry blackout
On and around the 7th October, tens of millions of Blackberry users began noticing problems with ‘Blackberry messenger’ (BBM), their internet browsing and their email services – resulting in outrage and frustration. The service failure lasted three days and affected most of the Blackberry customers in the western hemisphere. RIM (Research In Motion), the developer of Blackberry, claimed the cause was a failed switch in the core of the network – this means there was failure with a ‘specialised computer that directs communications within networks’. This failure shouldn’t had mattered, had the back-up system not also failed.
As it wasn’t the first outage in Blackberry’s history – it has lead to customers questioning its reliability and whether it is worth remaining faithful to Blackberry when there are so many, possibly better, smart phones on the market; with one of the closest rivals being the Apple iPhone. It is thought that, from the results of a study by ‘Kelkoo’ (a comparison website), one in five blackberry customers were thinking of switching to a different service provider in the week following the problems. Apparently; 19% of those surveyed were considering moving to another company, 42% would consider moving later and 9% already had (figures from telegraph article).
‘The largest outage we’ve ever experienced’ was how the co-chiefs of blackberry described the blackout during a question-and-answer session. And, following a public apology and explanation, the Blackberry Company promised to give each of their affected customers a free ‘app’ for their blackberry every day for 30 days.
If nothing else, the Blackberry blackout has helped me realised how dependent we are becoming on our mobile phones as a method of communication – and, at some times more than others, it is difficult to tell whether that is a good thing. In some ways, the Blackberry outage provided a ‘technology’ holiday for some people and highlighted to them how dependent on their phone they might have become.
HSBC Computer Malfunction
On the afternoon of Friday 4th October, a breakdown of the computers of HSBC – one of the largest banks in England – left many people unable to access their money. Customers experienced difficulties when attempting to reach its online service and were prevented from withdrawing from cash machines. People also reported that they couldn’t use their cards for shopping.
The whole problem cause huge inconvenience, especially at such a busy time for customers and the banking world. Services were down for more than two hours. The cause of the failure was unknown which caused some customers further concern as they worried over their personal information and money.
NatWest Failure followed one month later
One month later, on 4th November, NatWest – another big British bank – followed suit and experienced a computer crash. 15 million frustrated customers were unable to access their accounts; meaning they couldn’t check their balances or transfer money and some couldn’t use cash machines. The problem took over 15 hours to correct, so much longer than HSBC’s, and was said to have been caused by a fault during routine maintenance. Again, people were worried about their money and personal information but the bank assured that it was nothing to do with any sort of external hackers.
It seems that a lot of the time, Electronic convenience comes at the price of possible electronic failure.
Stealing FaceBook data
FaceBook is a social networking site that is popular all over the world. It is used by millions of people everyday – allowing them to email, instant message and post to friends and family, and upload photos.
Recently a new method of obtaining personal information from FaceBook, called ‘socialbots’, has been discovered. Socialbots are fake facebook profiles which, when accepted by people as friends, allows the creator to steal their personal information and photos. The study was done by researchers from the University of British Columbia and consisted of them sending out 102 socialbots for 8 weeks, each requesting 25 friendships a day. Out of the 8,570 requests made – 3,055 users accepted (figures from report on ‘the gadget website’). FaceBook responded to these claims, saying ‘the conditions for the research were unrealistic’, and discontinued many of the fake accounts. At the ‘Annual Computer Security Applications Conference’ next month in Florida, the team will present their findings.
Stories like these make people question the security of the internet, and whether or not they should display so much of themselves and their personal information over the web. It raises awareness of how important it is to be safe on the internet – and, on social networks, only accepting people who you really know. Most people do not realise how vulnerable they are over the web.
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