Tech Tent: BA’s computer meltdown
- Listen to previous episodes on the BBC website
- Listen live every Friday at 15:00 GMT on the BBC World Service
This
week has seen another example of the chaos that can ensue when complex
computer systems fail. On Tech Tent we try to draw some lessons from the
British Airways IT fiasco.
We also discuss bullying in online games and hear what the criminal underworld is saying about the WannaCry ransomware attack.
Lessons from an IT disaster
Last
weekend's catastrophic failure in BA's computer system threw the travel
plans of 75,000 passengers into chaos. What went wrong has become a
little clearer - it appears the power somehow went off at a Heathrow
data centre and when it was switched back on a power surge somehow took
out the whole system.
Airline bosses insist that this means the
whole incident was a power failure not an IT failure - but experts point
out that power management is an essential element of any well-planned
IT system.
Bert Craven of the consultancy T2RL, who has designed
systems for major airlines, tells us the real question is whether the
airline had what he calls geo-redundancy.
"This is a duplicate mirrored system in a data centre at a distance.
Clearly either that was not the case or there was also a problem with
the geo-redundant system at the same time - a perfect storm."
He
reckons every airline IT executive will have been hauled out of their
bed last weekend to be asked: "Could this happen to us?"
Passengers
may be tempted to ask whether it would be simpler to abandon the
computers and return to paper. Mr Craven tells us that until a few years
ago, airports were in the habit of printing out passenger manifests and
other documents at the beginning of the day just in case things went
wrong.
These days however there is just too much real-time data
involved in running complex airline operations for that to be feasible.
Only computers can make modern air travel work, and when they fail it is
like throwing sand into the machine.
Rough Games
We
are all sadly familiar with the problem of abuse and bullying on social
networks. But this week the anti-bullying charity Ditch The Label
published research showing the extent of the problem in online video
games.
Its survey, carried out through the online game Habbo
Hotel, showed more than half of young gamers reported that they had been
subjected to hate speech while playing online. Bailey Mitchell, 16,
told me he'd first experienced abuse when he was 10.
And it was more than just banter - he was told to kill himself after
scoring a goal in Fifa. Nowadays, he says, he can shrug it off, but when
he was younger he'd come home from being bullied at school expecting to
escape into a game, only to face abuse there too.
The games
industry was a bit sniffy about the charity's report, unconvinced that
Habbo Hotel was the right place to get an overview of the gaming scene.
Jo
Twist of the British games body Ukie tells us that the industry is
already acting responsibly, using everything from AI and semantic
analysis to human moderators to detect abuse.
"Players are our lifeblood," she says. "We use all sorts of tools to make sure they have a safe experience."
But
she says it's also up to players and parents to take responsibility.
"There are games that are suitable for everybody - and some games are
only suitable for 18-plus audiences."
WannaCry and the Underworld
It's
still not clear who was behind last month's WannaCry ransomware attack,
which affected organisations around the world, including hospitals here
in the UK. But whoever it was, it seems the criminal underworld was
not happy about it.
Andrei Barysevich is a cyber-security
researcher at the Recorded Future threat intelligence company, who works
as a consultant to the FBI and spends a lot of time monitoring the dark
web.
He tells us that criminal hackers were not at all impressed
by the high-profile nature of the attack - and were particularly angry
about hospitals and police forces being attacked. Not because they were
squeamish, you understand, but because governments and law enforcement
agencies are on the warpath - and that has put criminal hackers in the
spotlight.
It seems there was even a meeting of elders of the
criminal underground, at which they all declared that this attack was
nothing to do with them. It seems that WannaCry was probably hatched by a
relatively amateur group of hackers who may have been surprised by just
how much mayhem they unleashed.
It is as if a nuclear weapon
fell into the hands of a group of teenage pranksters who thought it was
just a firecracker - not an entirely reassuring thought.
BBC NEWS
