• Death, injury – physical and psychological – to members of staff, including key employees
• Physical damage to buildings, vehicles, and other assets
• Loss of data and damage to information systems
• Reputation damage through poor preparation
• Loss of market position

What you can do

• You should make sure you are receiving good assessed information relevant to your business
• As an organisation, you should consider your physical vulnerability to the impact of a terrorist attack or major incident
• You should consider seeking professional advice on other areas of vulnerability
• You should consider your business profile, trading partners, connections and public profile and seek help in assessing and reducing vulnerability
• You should try to assess whether your neighbours raise your vulnerability
• You should consider with your HR department whether your pre-employment screening processes are effective
• You should ask yourself the difficult “what if” questions and be satisfied with your own answers
• You should NOT assume it won’t happen to your business
• You MUST have a crisis management plan
• You MUST have a positive security culture

All businesses have a “duty of care” to staff and to customers. The legal implications to the management team if someone is injured or killed as a result of a failure on the part of the management in the event of a critical incident can be enormous.

Changing the Security Culture

Engendering a security culture without creating a tense atmosphere of fear is a finely balanced objective.

It has to begin at the top, but still for too many senior executives security is perceived as an unwelcome cost to be born grudgingly. Good security does mean cost, but it is the thing we care about most and people who don’t have confidence in their security will not perform well.

Moving down through an organisation, specific security responsibilities need to be assigned. People need to know who to speak to about concerns. They also need to know what is expected of them. Post an incident, an often heard lament is ‘No one told me I had to challenge strangers!’ People need to be encouraged to be as concerned about their workplace as they are about their homes.

So companies need to invest in visible measures that give staff confidence. They must not be window dressing, a uniformed guard supplied by an agency patrolling reception when the threat level increases, is not an alternative to an integrated and assessed security response. It may also be a waste of money! But a monitored electronically controlled access system may be an effective answer.

Crisis Management Planning

Implementing a Crisis Management Plan and gaining the trust and co-operation from your senior management and personnel is a big task; however, by communicating the right message, to the right people, at the right time is critical to managing a major incident. Crisis Management is a disciplined, logical and consistent approach that aims to protect an organisation’s personnel and assets by reducing the potential loss before it occurs and mitigating injury, loss and damage if an incident happens.

Whether as victims of direct attacks or as result of collateral damage to widespread and indiscriminate terrorist campaigns, your organisation must consider the vulnerability to the following criminal and politically motivated acts:

• acts of terrorism
• commercial sabotage
• product contamination
• criminal damage
• kidnap, hostage, extortion and ransom
• major systems attacks and reputation assaults

To be wholly effective, an organisation’s Crisis Management Plan should anticipate the impact of:

• loss of life
• material damage
• lethal contamination
• business interruption
• low shareholder confidence
• loss of industry reputation
• clean up costs

By failing to take advantage of the first “golden hour”, those responsible for maintaining continuity can turn a serious situation into a major crisis. As a situation develops, failure to have planned an established Crisis Management mechanism will exacerbate risk, damage reputation and harm the ability of an organisation to work effectively with local Government officials and law enforcement. It is essential that comprehensive Crisis Management strategies are established, understood, rehearsed and effectively implemented.

There is an abundance of evidence that whilst a badly handled incident can cause complete organisational failure, organisations that are perceived to have handled a crisis well, will earn public respect, retain customer loyalty and become stronger in the long term.

Conclusions

Every business is different, run in different ways and located in different areas. These differences, combined with the real threat of terrorism, should determine whether your organisation is at immediate risk. By investing time and resources and by being prepared and responding quickly with confidence, will demonstrate your organisation’s ability to confront and deal with a major business crisis. This will allow you to mitigate adverse effects on your employees, surrounding communities and the environment, as well as helping to avoid costly losses.

Roy Ramm, CSi Chairman

 

Figures compiled by DLA Piper and our on-line intellectual property specialists show the estimated value of counterfeit goods passing through on-line shopping sites in the UK to have doubled in just 3 years and is now over £800 million and is estimated by CSi to exceed £1 billion in the next year. The products most at risk of infringement and typically removed from on-line sites include high fashion and cosmetic items, consumer electronics, vehicle spares and sports goods. But nothing is safe from the counterfeiters. As well as the counterfeiting of brands and trade mark infringements, research also shows that on-line auction sites are fast becoming the market place of choice for the grey marketers. And the internet is not just the electronic version of a car boot sale. Many fraudulent sellers are earning in excess of £20,000 per month trading in bootlegged and counterfeit goods with some top sellers earning in excess of £1 million per annum.

Simon Levine, joint global head of DLA Piper’s technology, media and commercial group commented, ″Counterfeit goods dilute the value of brands, undermine the integrity of auction sites and ultimately cost the UK economy millions of pounds in lost income. But this is not just about protecting brand owners – it’s for the consumer’s benefit also. If you invest your trust and money in a brand you want to know you’re getting the real thing, whether that’s make up and cosmetics or domestic appliances and children’s toys. Buyers most certainly need to beware – you may think you are getting a bargain, but you could be funding organised crime or buying faulty or dangerous goods in the process. “Equally, this is not just a problem for the auction sites to address alone. Consumers need to report illegal or counterfeit trading and copyright owners need to work together with their legal representatives to take more active steps to police their brands on-line.”

James Ramm, Director, CSi said,"We call it E-fencing. Selling stolen, counterfeit or grey market goods. In hard times it's attractive for the buyers, but it's just as dangerous for them as buying something from a stranger in a pub. The quality is often terrible, sometimes dangerously so and there's no comeback. For the manufacturers and owners of the real product it is a serious issue. Their brand value is being eroded by cheap knock-offs. We use some very smart software to track the infringement of brands on-line, scanning both the image and textual descriptions. This is hard edged detective work in cyber space. And when we find illegally offered product, we are in a unique position not to just take the offending advertisements down - we have taken down £35 million worth in just last year - but also to do more conventional detective work, wear out some shoe leather and put together cases for prosecution in the real world."

CSi offer the most effective and comprehensive brand protection services available. Fully automated or integrated with existing systems, CSi's investigative software provides a comprehensive and highly cost effective solution to brand protection problems.

For further information call the investigative team at CSi on 020 7553 7960.

LONDON, February 26 /PRNewswire

Watchdog, a proactive and cost effective monitoring system developed by CSi, automates the time-consuming task of manually monitoring and removing infringing auction listings from a number of trading sites.

Counterfeit goods and brand infringing products appearing on internet auction sites such as ebay, amazon and b2b trade boards such as Alibaba, cause significant financial and negative brand reputation risk in terms of lost revenue, consumer loyalty, sub-standard performance and alarmingly, health and safety issues. All brands are at risk. Popular fashion brands, for example, are an easy target for counterfeiters, as the consumer demand for the latest "must have" attitude outstrips supply. Counterfeiters fill that gap.

Traditionally counterfeit has been associated with the fashion industry but perhaps more alarmingly for the consumer is the targeting of the automotive and electrical industries. Are those cheap brake disks on the auction site really the bargain they appear to be? More often than not these counterfeit goods are being passed off using the brand owner's original images and logos. Assessing where and how your brand is under attack will allow you to allocate resource as cost effectively as possible. Staying on top of this evolving problem requires structured monitoring.

Watchdog Benefits:

• Monitors eBay, amazon, ebid, alibaba and many other trading sites for suspicious and infringing items, 24/7, 365 days a year.
• Automates the time draining manual process of removing infringing items responding to the offending seller with immediate "Cease and Desist" letters and "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" notices.
• Locates international sellers selling into the European Economic Area preventing grey market activity and the loss of revenue such markets cause.
• Gathers intelligence on offending sellers and securely collects and stores an automated evidential package for future legal actions.
• Produces comprehensive management reports highlighting success rates, removal figures, turnover, seller statistics and tracks the progress of response.
• Allows users to establish where auctions originate.
• Searches auction listings for the brand owner's original electronic Images and logos copied from their website preventing passing off sales.
• Recognises authorised sellers ensuring that "bulk de-listings" do not upset legitimate sellers.
• Manages and automates the email obligations under eBay's VeRO notice scheme, as well as responses from offending sellers.
• Demonstrates to offending sellers that proactive action is being taken.