Blog Archive

Guidance on Writing the First External Communication After a Cyber Incident

In today’s bulletin, Charlie provides some useful information on how organisations should approach their communication to customers after a cyber incident. The following is guidance on communicating after a cyber incident. The formats for the initial communications are likely to be a press statement and information on the organisation’s website. 1 – Decide how visible

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Good, but Could Be Better: Cyber Comms Lessons from Glasgow City Council’s Cyber Attack – Initial Communications

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Glasgow City Council’s initial communications following a recent cyber attack, highlighting key lessons for crisis and business continuity professionals. As a business continuity professional, I rather enjoy reviewing the crisis communications from an organisation in the few days after a cyber attack. It provides

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In Praise of Plan Walkthroughs

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the value of going back to basics with a series of business continuity plan walkthroughs, highlighting how a structured review of plan content helped participants truly understand their roles and responsibilities during an incident. This week, I have been doing a number of plan walkthroughs for a client. The

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The Co-op Cyber Attack – A Timeline Case Study

In today’s bulletin, Charlie revisits the recent Co-op cyber attack and provides a useful timeline of events to highlight the progress of the incident. This week, I thought I would go back to cyber, as for the last two weeks I have been delivering my cyber course – firstly as a public course, and secondly as a

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The Crisis Communications Iceberg

This week, Charlie looks at key considerations in your communications response to an incident, and highlights the importance of including all staff in the communication. I have been delivering some crisis training this week to a client in the South of England, and I thought I would share some thoughts from that training. Typically when we mention communications in the context

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BCAW+R 2025 – Some Thoughts

 In today’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the webinars that were showcased by the BCI during BCAW and gives an insight into this year’s theme, ‘Empowering Resilience with AI’. This week, I was asked to write my bulletin on BCAW+R 2025 (Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week). With two days dedicated to cyber training and the other two

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What Are Deepfakes, And Should I Be Worried About Them?

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses deepfakes and how organisations can be better prepared for them. Images, throughout history, have been used to tell stories and to emphasise their importance and to flatter individuals or to mock and belittle them. Deepfakes are the modern manifest of this trend. Next week, I am going to be

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Should We Be Using AI to Transcribe Incident or Crisis Team Meetings?

In today’s bulletin, Charlie talks about transcribing in meetings and looks into the pros and cons of recording meetings. I was having a long discussion with my colleague, Jamie Lees, this morning all about a talk we are giving for Business Continuity Awareness Week. We have a working title of “Man or Machine: Who Should

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Tariffs and Market Volatility: What is the Role of the Business Continuity Manager?

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses tariffs and how businesses can be more resilient to external change and disruption. As an in-house business continuity manager, I’ve always believed there should be a clear distinction between managing crises and incidents—whatever your organisation calls them—and addressing day-to-day or longer-term challenges that could affect operations. If I was

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Heathrow Power Outage: Unseen Lessons

In today’s bulletin, Charlie discusses Heathrow Airport’s recent power outage and gives advice on how we can learn from the event. I did a load of research for this week’s podcast, so I thought I would use that research to write the bulletin as well. I wrote a bulletin some time ago on the CrowdStrike incident and whether consultants

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Backing Up OT, SCADA and PLCs

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie continues his discussion into backups, looking at devices that are responsible for keeping machinery running smoothly. Today’s bulletin sounds like a scintillating subject and is guaranteed to send you to sleep, but bear with us, as this is an extremely important topic. Operational Technology (OT) can be found in industrial

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Stages of Recovery After a Cyber Incident

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie looks at the 9 stages of recovery from a cyber incident and highlights the importance of having recovery in our business continuity plans. This is the third part of my journey to discover more about backups and the technical aspects of recovery after a cyber incident. I realise most readers

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Should We Be Visiting Our ‘Maximum Scale of Incident’?

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses global issues and gives an insight into what is meant by ‘Maximum Scale of Incident’. I was listening to the news in the middle of the night and I very much felt, in the words of Bob Dylan, “The times they are a-changin”. We have the likelihood of tariffs,

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Backups: What Do You Need to Think About?

Continuing/following on from his bulletin on backups in December, this week Charlie looks at them in more detail and provides some useful points to consider in our own organisations. I did my first bulletin about backups before Christmas and thought I would continue today by sharing what I have learned. I must say thanks to

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Eight Lessons from the Los Angeles Fires

In this week’s bulletin, Charlie discusses the impact of the devastating fires in Los Angeles and gives an important insight into what we can learn from the event. This week, I was interviewed by Alex Fullick for his ‘Preparing for the Unexpected’ podcast. The title of my talk was ‘Future Risks: Why the World is

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