NHS cyber attack confirmed as being written on post-it notes

'We found the notes stuck inside the patient files, with all the important pages removed and just yellow sticker saying "pay £15Billion or you will never get Billy Jones' results back",' said an NHS security consultant today. 'There must have been thousands of files with the notes removed. Not all mentioned Billy, obvs.'

His colleague working across the desk on 111 cyber security confirmed that the back-up floppy disc had been 'waved over a magnet or something' and had the all-telling post-it note attached. 'We'd send everyone an email if we had an IT system,' said the consultant, 'and when I went to the semaphore cupboard to implement our fallback system, both flags had post-it notes on - totally unusable.'

photo: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/

Mothers’ maiden names to be made more complicated

It is a question asked millions of times a day in call centres the world over. ‘What is your mother’s maiden name?’ All too often it is a piece of information that can allow fraudsters access to all manner of private data.

Studies undertaken by the Institute for Online Security in Reading have revealed that four out of ten people will reveal their father’s name, the name of their first pet and their favourite subject at school within five minutes of meeting a stranger.

Professor Maria Higg1ns42 said that women’s surnames should in future contain at least eight characters, including at least two numbers. But Dr Helen W00psy-diddly-d@ndy! says that may not be enough, and is proposing even greater complexity with the use of shift and alt keys, and possibly even Cyrillic characters.

‘The issue is even more complicated than that,’ argued Jim 12OcelotSandwiches, senior lecturer in security studies at the University_of_12_Peculiar_Secrets.

‘Too many of us will invent funny mother’s maiden names only to blurt them out in social situations to gain an approving laugh. Then we’ll need a new password, and so on. I can see a future in which people will have to prove their identity by producing a sample of an agreed bodily fluid.’

Image: madartzgraphics | Pixabay

Story taken from '15 Years of Typos'

DDoS activists ‘think they are so funny’

The NewsBiscuit tech team, analysts and spin doctors have spent the whole of Sunday evening up until medication and cocoa time attempting to resolve what appears to be yet another Dedicated Denial of Service (DDoS) upon NewsBiscuit.

Not everyone thinks this is the work of disenchanted hackers looking for easy prey. ‘It’s a conspiracy,’ said a conspiracy theory expert. ‘Everyone knows all conspiracy theories are started by the government,’ citing ‘Brexit’ and ‘Johnson apparently being a Prime Minister’ as examples, which seemed evidence enough. ‘You guys are always going after Raaaaab the Foreign Secretaaaaary, and Priti, please, Patel, so why wouldn’t they try to shut you down?’

Others think it is simpler than that. ‘It’s the Top Ten algorithm – it’s become sentient, gone rogue,’ said one contributor who didn’t want his name being released. ‘let’s just say, I’m always at number eleven,’ he grumbled.

Another suspect is Apostrophe Rebellion, AR. ‘It’s obviously the AR’s work – er, ARs’ work. Let’s just put it down to AR,’ said an expert.

Some believe the outage was caused by Biscuiteers themselves, panic downloading their whole writing history before the current site switches to the new site. ‘It was fine until Titus started,’ said one insider. ‘Fifteen terabytes of tickers that have never been used.’

‘It was never like this when JoF was in charge,’ accused one disgruntled Biscuiteer. ‘He’d go in with all guns blazing. Now they’ll probably just write a half arsed front page and carry on as if nothing happened.’

However, most experts believe it was DDOS activists, pubescent hackers without a life targeting middle aged men without a life. ‘We’re not so different,’ mused one Biscuiteer, ‘if they think they are so funny, why don’t they try writing for NewsBiscuit instead?’

Image: TheDigitalArtist/Pixabay