Business Continuity Survey: How prepared are businesses?

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We couldn’t quite take our eyes off this recent study conducted by Forrester Research and Disaster Recovery Journal. The results were too compelling.

Titled, “State of Business Continuity Preparedness,” 300 DRJ members shared their insights and fears into what puts their business continuity at risk:

  • 61% of respondents were from organizations with 1,000 or more employees
  • with revenues ranging from under $500 million to more than $10 billion
  • and represented a variety of industries primarily from North America (82%).

Some of the key findings:

The top three reasons for increased risk to business continuity are:

  • increased reliance on technology (48%)
  • business organization complexity (37%)
  • increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters (36%)

business continuity survey

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Is your Smartphone safe from viruses and malware?

February 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Uh, no.

The good news is that some smart phones are safer than others.

But that also depends on how you’ve cared for it.

For example, Apple’s wildly popular iPhone is built on a restrictive platform that protects it from being vulnerable to viruses and malware being installed on it. Thank goodness.

iPhone_4s

iPhone

That all goes out the window however, if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone. To “jailbreak” one’s iPhone is to modify the phone’s operating system. People often do this when they have an older model phone and they want to install features that may be offered in a newer version than they currently own. “Jailbreaking” gives greater control over the device, including being able to remove the Apple-imposed restrictions to install apps from sites other than the official app store. Yet, it’s exactly the removal of those well-designed restrictions that takes the protective shield away from the iPhone’s operating system, and puts the smart phone at risk to hackers and thieves.

Note: do not jailbreak your iPhone.

It’s those hackers and thieves that have captured their prey lately in another highly popular smart phone: the Google Android phone. Forbes magazine reported earlier this month that there’s a new nasty virus attacking Droids that when installed, contains no malicious code and therefore goes undetected. But wait, there’s more. After a few hours or a few days, the sinister app downloads a new code from a remote server and hides the data transfer from the user.  [Read more...]

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Are Oregon and Washington State in danger of an epic tsunami disaster?

February 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

All Pacific-coasters should be fearful of what’s referred to as the Cascadia subduction zone. It is a 600-mile-long offshore earthquake fault that runs from northern California to southern British Columbia.

And that fault has a serious tale to tell. Geologists have found sand deposits up and down the Pacific coast along this zone, the result of a tsunami a little over 300 years ago.

We agree, three hundred years is a long time and that bit of trivia in and of itself may not seem threatening, but pair it with what scientists now know about earthquake patterns, and the Pacific Northwest Coasters should be trembling in fear – or at least preparing for an impending disaster in the very near future.

“I think all subduction zones are guilty until proven otherwise,” Dr. Kerry Sieh told National Geographic in their February 2012 issue. Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, is one of the world’s leading paleoseismologist. He spends his days obsessing over geologic records for evidence of ancient earthquakes and tsunamis, and identifies what he calls, “supercycles” or clusters of big earthquakes that occur at regular and predictable intervals. [Read more...]

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Predicting Earthquakes and Tsunamis

February 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tsunamis are arguably one of the most devastating and difficult to predict natural disasters. Evidence of this is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which is considered among the deadliest in human history, credited with more than 230,000 people killed in 14 countries bordering the Indian Ocean.

While the science is nowhere near exact, researchers are closely examining vulnerable areas of the world based on the theory that history does and will repeat itself. They have found what they refer to as “supercycles,” or clusters of big earthquakes occurring at regular intervals. It’s these underwater earthquakes that have the potential to create tsunamis of epic proportions.

Leading the supercycles charge is Dr. Kerry Sieh, currently serving as director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Sieh is one of the world’s leading paleoseismologists studying earthquake patterns. He and his team have discovered that for at least the past 700 years, pairs of large earthquakes have occurred about every 200 years on a segment of the Sunda megathrust, a fault extending 3,300 miles from the southwestern side of Sumatra to the south of Java and Bali and ending near Australia. The earthquakes in each pair were separated by roughly 30 years. Sieh found there had been a pair of quakes around years 1350 and 1380, another pair in the early to mid 1600s, and a third pair n 1797 and 1833. [Read more...]

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