UKWA FOR WEB - United Kingdom Warehousing Association

28 Security
Paul Burton, UKWA’s honorary adviser on security matters, continues his series
of thoughts on security issues that impact on the warehousing and logistics sectors
Look out for the
cyber criminals
Greetings, from Sorrento! I am forced
to be over here, sitting in the sun drinking
cheap Italian wine. I'm at a security conference
with a hundred plus, overweight, middle-aged
Americans - all of whom are
members of a top secret (until now) network
of investigators, who work together with the
assistance of local investigators al over the
world. I have worked in Singapore, Russia,
Estonia, Nigeria and, of course, America -
North & South, and local knowledge has
proved to be tremendously useful in helping
solve international crime.
Apart from allowing me to slurp cheap
wine for a few days and, indeed, to feel
slim next to these Americans, the trip has
been worthwhile because some of the presentations
I have sat through have highlgihted
just how clever some investigations
have become - depressingly though, the
crooks always seem to be one step ahead.
The internet, which is often seen as a power
for bad, can in fact be extremely useful in
tracing people, and so this month it has
proved. We were asked to hunt down a
woman and a child last heard of in the
Halesowen area and eventually found her
in Worthing.
Now, the reason I tell you this, is that it
turns out that the (formerly) missing woman
has been having a bad run of luck just lately:
each company she goes to work for
eventually has to sack her for professional
misconduct and she, in turn, threatens to
take the company to tribunal for some perceived
wrong-doing. So far we have found
five companies that have settled out of court
and given her a payoff. You could say she's
doing very nicely, thank you!
Oh, and just for your information, she is
using four different names – she changes
them by deed poll regularly.
The moral of this little tale is don't
believe written references. I have St Michael
on my underpants, and I am not a priest.
Goya was a great artist, although of
course, that's subjective. GOYA was also the
advice given to me by my old Sargeant: it
stood for: Get Off Your Arse.
I had to say this to myself this month
when I was looking at a guard hut in the
midlands. The first point of contact for VIPs
visiting any site is the guard hut, and as first
impressions are only made once, I went to
see this particular hut and the staff working
in it. There was no running water in the hut
and the guards had to walk 200 metres to
the nearest fascilities.
I spoke to the female guard there who
was vertically challenged and, although
tenacious, the placement of numerous
monitors in the windows made it physically
impossible for her to see out of her window.
This meant that to her 40 tonne HGVs
would suddenly appear as if by magic!
If we hadn't got up off our bottoms we
would never have seen the bright sunlight
in the guard hut which was completely
obscurring the television monitors at that
time in the afternoon.
June 2008
www.ukwa.org.uk
November/December2006