Bank E-Communications Aid During London Bombings

davidwr writes "Reuters and eWeek report on how the British Banks' emergency chatroom and web site helped them cope with Thursday's terrorist bombing." From the article: "The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority switched on a secure section of their Financial Sector Continuity Web site to talk to major banks in the City of London's financial hub about how they were coping. A Bank of England spokeswoman said this was the first time the secure site had been used in an actual crisis situation since its creation in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York."

Comments

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can give it a try. The standard technology used to secure these sites is 128-bit certificates, maybe with a backup system such as biometrics or Secure ID tags. Plus, all traffic in and out is monitored and recorded 24x7 (it's a regulatory requirement), so a bunch of IPs knocking on the door would get noticed in seconds flat.

Re:True about power to kill civilian mobile phones

[Anonymous Cowpat]

they don't knock the civilian networks off (the police have civilian phones) they make the cells in the effected area stop accepting calls from phones not set up with the ACCOLC system. The idea being that the police, fire birgade, paramedics, doctors etc have these phones, so that the system will let them through.

Re:Come on people...

[Tim C]

Did you not hear all about phone systems and long-distance phone networks getting clogged with calls?

Some of us didn't just hear about it, we were trying to use the network at the time. I live on the outskirts of London and work in the centre, and was walking across London (due to the public transport shutdown) at the time. The first I knew of any bombs was when I got an sms from my parents asking if I was ok.

It took a frustrating couple of minutes to get through to them, and then to my girlfriend, who had been trying to get in touch with me for about an hour. Still, in the circumstances, I think a couple of minutes is perfectly acceptable; it's the same at New Year's Eve, another time when everyone is phoning everyone.

In contrast, when I finally got to the office at around 10:30, my net connection was fine. The BBC news website (news.bbc.co.uk) was responding well, although a little sluggishly, while the Transport for London site (www.tfl.gov.uk, the main website for information on public transport in London) was naturally having trouble coping until they replaced it with a single static page. The net itself was unaffected, at least from my point of view.

Excellent!

[crovira]

That means that LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offering Rates) could still get through. This is essential for the world economy.

In case you didn't know, that means that mortgage rates in the 'States could be set.

In addition to the deals that banks can work out between themselves, the LIBOR rates, apart from eliciting comments on Rense.com about America being nothing more than a branch plant economy to our British overlords, are a fundamental component of the banking rates in the states. (Why do you think that London is so imporant? Its not the food or the beer [Smithwicks excepted]. :-)

The rates for the mortgage on a shot-gun shack in "Scrote, Arkansas" are set in London.

That is the beauty of market rates. But the "market" is in London.