Council crash

Schadenfreude is not the most attractive thing in the world, says John Hillman, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

As we scour the world to bring you news of the latest virus outbreaks it’s not often that we come across a story that, dare we say it, might bring a smile to the face of the average person on the street.

But anyone in the UK who has rushed back from the shops, one minute over their allotted parking time, to find an intransigent uniformed council official smugly attaching a parking ticket to their car and grinning at them as they hopelessly plead for mercy, can’t help but chuckle at the plight of the Ealing Council worker who plugged a virus infected memory stick into his office PC and caused 1,838 of them to be lost.

However, having indulged my inner Jeremy Clarkson, the story in today’s Guardian highlights just how vulnerable even large scale organisations allow themselves to become by not making sure that they are protected with robust anti-virus software.

The infected memory stick unleashed a wave of chaos throughout the council’s computer system. Phone lines were brought down and internal communications made impossible. It cost Ealing over £500,000 in lost revenue, from lost library fines to uncollected rents, with a staggering £90,000 from the unpaid parking tickets alone.

The Tory run council has stated that it managed to protect frontline services and deal with the problem quickly and efficiently. However, £500,000 is going to leave a big hole in their finances – one which they’re going to have to fix. So how do you think they’ll do that? By increasing the number of traffic wardens perhaps? Next time I go to Ealing I think I’ll be taking the bus (sorry Jeremy).

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Image credit: Paul & Aline