Not so Civil Servants

As the new inquiry in to the Hillsborough disaster got underway a number of disturbing facts came to light.

Whitehall Street Sign

One that hit the news late in April was the discovery that civil servants had been making sickening edits to a variety of Wikipedia pages, starting in 2009, the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

In one instance “Blame Liverpool fans” was added to the Hillsborough section of Wiki.

In 2012, computers again accessed Wikipedia to make edits from Whitehall’s secure network, changing “You’ll never walk alone” to “You’ll never walk again”.

Although Wikipedia has been able to identify the IP addresses used to make these edits, all this serves to demonstrate is that they originated from Whitehall, there’s no way to identify who, out of the hundreds of thousands of users on the network, actually made the edits.

Unless they own up, or someone else who knows who made the edits provides the names it’s highly likely that the culprits will evade any action

Similar problems exist within our education establishments, thousands of incidents of cyber-bullying have been reported with many posts being made by children of school age during school time, inferring that they took place whilst the posters were on school premises, potentially using the school’s IT network.

Now there’s a solution. The latest security appliances from Cyberoam not only secure networks from external hacking and intrusion but enable IT managers to log all internet access, blocking sites with black lists, allowing sites via whitelisting and recording individual activity, enabling any improper web access to be traced back to the perpetrator.

If you are worried about the security of your IT network then please get in touch to explore the issues, discuss your concerns and find solutions. Drop me an email or give me a call, 01793 238020, for a free and confidential chat about your concerns.