This notice is currently running on the council’s website:
As part of the ongoing work to protect the council from a computer virus the council’s IT systems, including the website and telephone network, had to be shut down on Wednesday (20 May 2009).
The council’s main office, Perceval House in Ealing, including the Customer Services Centre is fully operational. Work on computers at other council buildings is underway.
The online payments system is currently unavailable. Engineers are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.
The council apologises for any inconvenience caused.
For most of the last week the council has been blighted by a virus. Things are finally getting back to normal this morning. It seems that our technical architecture is rather closely coupled and this has caused widespread disruption of many systems including phones, e-mail and the website. I know that this has affected many of the users of the services I am responsible for. Sorry. There will be a lot of hard questions asked of our technology people over the next few days and weeks I can tell you.
I visited Ealing Central Library yesterday afternoon and the staff were cheerfully coping with a difficult situation. They were able to use laptops to check books in and out so top marks for that work around. Unfortunately all the internet PCs were out which must have been an inconvenience to many users. Sorry again.
This morning I visited the customer services centre at Perceval House. I often do this as you know. It was working surprisingly well with cloakroom tickets and, again, a cheerful attitude from staff who have had a difficult week. That said it took 33 minutes to get from the front desk to see a parking agent which is my usual test. This is an unacceptably long time. There were meant to be five staff on parking issues but one was on break and one was dealing with a backlog from yesterday. The work rate from the remaining three did not seem to be up to meeting the modest demand.
There were two cashiers windows open and only one person being served so no problem there. The meeters and greeters were also working smoothly and cheerfully.
5 replies on “Council catches a cold”
Gosh, I don’t really like to kick a man whilst he’s down but…
‘..our technical architecture is rather closely coupled.’
Web site/email and telephones coupled? How did that pass any reasonable risk assessment exercise.
Organisations aren’t blighted by viruses. Organisations fail to prevent viruses infecting their systems.
Also I know of no major UK organisation whose web site, email system and phone sytem all failed at the same time for four consecutive days.
On balance I’d rather pay more Council Tax in order to have reliable digital information services.
We appreciate your saying sorry.
Eric,
Don’t let the facts spoil a good rant:
Reference here is slightly old but I haven’t got time to find a better one. You might like to back up your assertions with some facts, however old, Eric.
Oh and another thing! Eric, you are already paying something like 5% more council tax to pay for the last administration’s Response programme which cost £50 million. This was the same project that centralised many systems and made us susceptible to single point failures.
I don’t think the current administration is going to apologise for not rushing into spending £ millions undoing all that. We’d rather use the capital for parks, street lights, heritage buildings, swimming pools, libraries, etc.
Not only are those facts well out of date but look like they were produced by a body with a vested interested in selling security solutions. Like Eric I’ve not heard of a UK organisation of comparable size suffering so much damage. For a virus to have quite such a comprehensive effect smacks of lack of basic security precautions such as:
Lack of regularly updated security software.
Failure to apply security updates to the operating systems and other software in a timely manner.
IT staff performing routine work using administratrative accounts.
Absence of internal firewalls, eg. between telephone and mail servers and the rest of the network.
Bypassing of security features in software, such as allowing Outlook to open .exe files.
Allowing users local administration rights on workstations.
This sort of thing is shoddy practice in a ten seat organisation. In one of the largest local authorities in the UK it’s inexcusable. In the private sector several people would have left the building with their personal items in a carrier bag by now but I don’t suppose that will happen here.
And why do the updates insist on refering to “protect from a virus” rather than “recover from” or “virus threat” when they mean “virus infection”?
If you want someone to write some of those difficult questions I’d be delighted to help. Seriously.
Phil
If what Mr Johnson says is true then I think you should comment on this.
Also is there some serious money to upgrade the Council IT systems in the budgets?
I agree that our roads should be upgraded, but too much is being spent on pavements which are not in serious disorder. So next year reduce pavement spending and increase infrastructure IT spending.