U.K. customs to launch ‘Fallback’ platform to protect against cyberattacks

After a slew of cyberattacks and IT failures slammed the air cargo sector this week, an electronic fallback system that keeps customs operations ticking along the U.K.’s border has met government approval and is now ready to go live.

Developed by British Telecom (BT) and CCS-UK, a trade body made up of representatives from the U.K.’s air cargo community, “CCS-UK Fallback” allows authorized traders to continue processing customs export declarations in the event of any significant system outage. That means that even if hackers shut down customs authority platforms, shippers can still receive automatic fallback clearance to ship goods, avoiding the backlogging that would result from manual customs clearance.

“We have recently seen the horrendous impact of major IT system failures in aviation, and this cannot be allowed to happen to the U.K. air cargo industry,” said Steve Parker, DHL’s head of customs for Europe and chairman of the CCS-UK User Group.  The CCS-UK Fallback, Parker explained, “helps maintain our competitiveness on the world stage and supplies urgent commodities that are sometimes a matter of life and death.”

Once triggered, the CCS-UK Fallback will function for up to 30 days, logging information that is then sent to the Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) organization as soon as the government’s systems return to normal operation.

Colm O’Neill, managing director, major business and public sector at BT, added that, “We’re urging the specialist IT systems providers for the air cargo community to update their products to take advantage of this new feature, while the industry as a whole should start training its staff so that everyone is ready to use the new function should we need to implement it.”