Charities’ security system face particular threat from hacktivists who disagree with their objectives, the chief information officer at the Royal British Legion said last week.
Brychan Watkins was speaking at the Institute of Fundraising’ Technology special interest group’s annual conference on Friday.
He said that the challenges for charity chief information officers could be grouped into three main categories: bad guys, magic and myths.
He said the first challenge referred to hackers - particularly those who disagreed with charities' principles. The second referred to staff with an unrealistic idea of what their own technology could achieve. And the third referred to concepts like "big data"which are supposed to have a transformative effect, but which are unlikely to do so.
'Bad guys mistook us for the Ministry of Defence'
Referring to the fine that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service received after its website was hacked by an anti-abortion campaigner, Watkins said that this type of attack was “a particular threat to our sector” as there are people who disagree with the objectivees of charities or paricular campaigns.
He added that at the Legion hackers have “mistaken us for being part of the Ministry of Defence”.
Making sure that staff understand the importance of good information security is “one of the biggest challenges” and that they need to understand that “losing information about vulnerable people can have terrible consequences”.
The challenge of 'big data' is a myth
Watkins said that charity does not have the large pools of data that can be classified as ‘big data’ on the same scale as organisations like Channel Four.
He said that: “Most organisations’ fundraising data can fit on a USB stick” and but it “doesn’t mean that we can’t use those methods”.
He added that most of the tools are relatively cheap or free and easy to use and that the real “difficulty is knowing what you want to get out of the data”.
Apple can do magic. We can't.
Technology such as Apple’s iPads gives staff unrealistic expectations of what can be done in work place, he said.
He said charities cannot replicate similar ‘magic’ to Apple’s because they “don’t have a budget of $13bn”.
Three rules to tackle technology challenges
Watkins also said he has come up with three rules to help charity IT leaders explain the limitations of what is possible. They are:
- We can’t break the laws of physics
- We can’t supply things that no one has – eg 3G in Dartmoor
- We have to be cost effective
- For the May issue of Charity Finance a roundtable of experts addressed the issue of cybercrime. Read it here online here or find out more about subscribing.
