Saturday 13 May 2017

Cyber attacks, the common sense truth

It is 30 years since I used to earn a crust advising companies on computer systems but what was true then is still valid today its just a pity the media are so abysmally ignorant of IT as of course are our political elite. Given they both come out of the same word driven  PPE swamp to use the Donald's term, this is scarcely surprising .

Windows XP is undoubtedly the operating system that has beeen attacked. It was a good secure operating system but the subsequent upgrades were more difficult to use and initially full of bugs that were eventuallly rectified but by that time the damage had been done and many people had reverted to XP which they were familiar with and could work. Its not a lack of money that caused the NHS to fall back on XP, they needed something that their staff could work.

The media blather about lack of upgrades is nonsense. The cost of upgrading to a new version of Windows was trivial in the grand scheme of things. That is the easy part the difficult bit is training people up to use the new system and them gaining familiarity and confidence with it. I had to point out this to numerous firms CEOs. Some listened, dome did not. Politicians and NHS top management are not known for listening and taking common sense advice but we have to pay for their tin ears.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Like many companies who have associated specialist equipment that will only work with XP, upgrading means the whole shebang. Better use an alternative system.