KPN working on a possible threat of significant service disruption from Electro Magnetic Pulse caused by Solar Activity

Jaap Halfweeg, Chief Information Security Officer at the Dutch-owned telco KPN, joined with senior executives attending the Corporate Executive Programme’s Global Risk Summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in May to debate trends and anticipate the major risks that will impact international business over the next 12 months.

Halfweeg warned the group that experts predict that in 2010, we will experience a solar peak which will be the strongest measured during the previous 50 to 200 years. This Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) has proven in the past to affect power grids and communications. For obvious reasons KPN has been putting effort into researching this phenomenon in an attempt to become more precise about the timing and affects on its own networks and telecommunications services. Halfweeg advised that we can expect only a few hours warning of the EMP strikes that will occur in 2010/11 and that KPN is investigating what measures should be taken to minimize impact (if any).

The Corporate Executive Programme (CEP) (www.globalcep.com) is an affiliate of FIRST (www.first.org) the world’s leading incident handling Forum. The CEP brings together senior executives from diverse functions across organisations, to discuss the impact of cross-functional risk on their organisations.

Companies and organisations represented at this year’s Gleneagles Global Risk Summit included Diageo, Intel, HSBC, KPN, Bank of England, CitiGroup, Sun Microsystems, Verisign, UC Group, Forrester Research, Mitsubishi UFJ, CISCO, Open Text, Imprivata and the UK’s Department for Transport.

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