A Solution To Computer Hacking: Don’t Use A Computer

An early candidate for headline of the year: BBC apologises after sex noises heard during FA Cup coverage.

(No links needed, you either saw it or you can find it).

The broadcaster apologised. Gary Lineker laughed it off, and tweeted a picture of the offending mobile phone, taped “to the back of the set”.

Lineker said: “As sabotage goes it was quite amusing.”

Sure, and it seems harmless enough, though it does raise a security question and the thought that the BBC systems must be vulnerable to more serious attack.

The Guardian already knows how vulnerable it is.

It was hit by a ransomware attack in December, something it revealed a few days ago.

This was a “highly-sophisticated cyber-attack” that saw the personal data of staff accessed, it revealed.

Given the sort of data many Guardian reporters have on their computers, that’s potentially very serious.

We’ll know more later, we assume, and this stuff is everywhere.

A government report last year said two in five businesses have faced a cyber-attack in the last 12 months.

My guess is that newspaper systems in general are highly vulnerable, just because papers have so routinely underinvested in IT.

Flaks and their clients have been cyber-paranoid ever since WFH emerged. To join a simple call, there are quite often numerous hoops to jump through.

You can see why, though a non-expert view is that the more bureaucracy there is, the more systems there are to exploit.

All of which sounds like a good case for newspaper hacks and flaks to conduct business in person, like they did in the good old days.