Disaster Preparedness

The Mayor from the City of San Francisco Gavin Newsom met on Monday with the jailed Terry Childs convincing him to hand over the administrative passwords to the City's network. Terry Childs, handed the passwords over to Mayor Newsom, who was "the only person he felt he could trust," according to a declaration filed in court by his attorney, Erin Crane. Newsom is ultimately responsible for the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) where Childs... Read Full Story

The story has of course received a large amount of coverage and apparently one of the writers over at InfoWorld has been given more on the story by an insider. I am not going to post the story on my blog word for word but rather provide a link back to the story at InfoWorld. I think it is a worth while read, especially if you are an IT manager, or in upper management where you work. Also an important lesson for admins as well. Paul Venezia does an excellent job with the story and I prefer... Read Full Story

In San Francisco an IT administrator was arrested after locking the system to other administrators and refuses to give up the password. The employee, 43-year-old Terry Childs, was arrested Sunday. He gave some passwords to police, which did not work, and refused to reveal the real code. The system in question is a multi-million dollar computer system for San Francisco that handles sensitive data such as city payroll files, jail bookings, law enforcement documents, and... Read Full Story

Here is an incident that happened in Australia on June 3rd 2008, that was brought to my attention Chris Miller of B4Crisis. Chris miller deserves full credit for bringing this to my attention, as well as conducting the research provided in this posting. She will also be providing a follow up to the story at a later date as well. Note: I left the article unedited as far as content and the posting does not follow the usual format but all sources for the story are located within the posting... Read Full Story

Planning for a pandemic especially in todays global business environment is essential for a business to survive. For it is not "IF" the next pandemic will occur it is "WHEN." In the last century there were three separate pandemics that occurred the last of which was known as the Hong Kong Flu (H3N2) in 1968, another in 1957 known as Asian Flu (H2N2) and the Spanish Flu which occurred in 1918. The Spanish Flu resulted in 50 to 100 million plus deaths worldwide and 550,000 - 675,000 deaths in... Read Full Story

The Workshop was a huge success, very informative. Several people mentioned that it was one of the best events they have been to in quite some time. I will have to agree with that statement. I'll post some more on the event tomorrow. Since I was working on less than two hours sleep I am completely exhausted and need some down time to recoup. I will make this one announcement on the site now though. Roche, the company who sponsored the event announced some breaking news during a press... Read Full Story

I am currently at the Pandemic Workshop here in San Francisco hoping to see some new developments and learn something new during the workshop. I'll comment further on my experience there and how it went when I get back later in the evening. If you happen to be attending and you know who I am feel free to stop and say hello. It should be fun and educational, see you there. Read Full Story

June 22 - 28, 2008 is Lightning Safety Week and an average of 62 persons per year are killed by lightning strikes. This year there have been eight fatalities thus far due to lightning. Lets take the time to go over some lightning safety procedures and look at some of the common myths surrounding lightning. One of the most common Myths about lightning is that it never strikes the same place twice, in fact the opposite is true and the Empire State Building is struck by lightning on record as... Read Full Story