PR Fail

You may have noticed that the comments section to my piece an Cllr Mick Newton's story of his illness looks a bit busy. If you haven't already I recommend you go have a look. It presents an interesting view of how to make a total ass of youself online NCC's PR strategy.

Corporate Media Manager Stephan Richeux took offence at my quite clear statement that baseball batting someone in the face would be an 'unacceptable reaction' which is slightly bizarre. Does this mean he thinks that it is acceptable?

The point I was making, which I am sure is plain and clear to all lifeforms above the 'drunken amoeba' level is that, after being treated extremely badly in a life/career ruining kind of way, there are good ways of channeling your anger and bad ways. I like to think I've picked the good way. Perhaps Mr Richeux disagrees.

Of course he missed the bit where I was praising a NCC councillor for his frankness and honesty and the bit where I wrote about my own personal experiences, including the hint of an admission that not all of my feelings in response to the way I've been treated have been good but at least I've not been daft enough to act on them and never will. He homed in on an admittedly flippant remark which I used as part of my attempt to make light of the issue. It's a defence tactic I often use when things get a bit heavy.

And it all seemed to go downhill from there, the result being that Richeux makes a total dick of himself. Not a bright thing to do in the world of PR I'd have thought but there you go.

IT Trubs

A while ago I noticed that there were hints of IT security trouble up at t'mill but I couldn't find anything concrete about it. There were a couple of references to confidential reports in meeting minutes but no detail because the public were excluded.

A little bit has come out now via a report to the Audit Committee although some of it has been kept confidential.

Apparently 14 areas of high level of risk were identified of which 4 remain. The report reveals that NCC were caught by the Conficker virus (although not as badly as Manchester City Council as the report falls over itself to point out). Perhaps most seriously, a new security manager identified a serious flaw in the credit card payments system that could have resulted in a fine and/or the loss of the ability to take credit card payments if it hadn't been addressed. The report doesn't describe the nature of the lapse but any combination of the words 'security lapse' and 'my credit card details' would be enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.

Apparently they've sent the IT team on some training as well. Which is nice.

Update; Found an earlier report describing some of the fallout of the Conficker infection here. Some of the cost was due to a need to replace 350 computers at a cost of £185k because they were too old to apply the MS Malicious Software tool and other anti-virus gubbins. This probably gives you a clue as to how old these machines were.