Tag Archives: Seeing

Report: ERP security is weak, vulnerable and under attack

ERP systems are seeing growing levels of attack for two reasons. First, many of these systems — especially in the U.S. — are now connected to the internet. Second, ERP security is hard. These systems are so complex and customized that patching is expensive, complicated and often put off. 

Windows systems are often patched within days, but users may wait years to patch some ERP systems. There are old versions of PeopleSoft and other ERP applications, for instance, that are out-of-date and connected to the internet, according to researchers at two cybersecurity firms, which jointly looked at the risks faced in ERP security.

These large corporate systems, which manage global supply chains and manufacturing operations, could be compromised and shut down by an attacker, said Juan Pablo Perez-Etchegoyen, CTO of Onapsis, a cybersecurity firm based in Boston.

“If someone manages to breach one of those [ERP] applications, they could literally stop operations for some of those big players,” Perez-Etchegoyen said in an interview. His firm, along with Digital Shadows, released a report, “ERP Applications Under Fire: How Cyberattackers Target the Crown Jewels,” which was recently cited as a must-read by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team within the Department of Homeland Security. This report looked specifically at Oracle and SAP ERP systems.

Warnings of security vulnerabilities are not new

Cybersecurity researchers have been warning for a long time that U.S. critical infrastructure is vulnerable. Much of the focus has been on power plants and other utilities. But ERP systems are managing critical infrastructure, and the report by Onapsis and Digital Shadows is seen backing up a broader worry about infrastructure risks.

“The great risk in ERP is disruption,” said Alan Paller, the founder of SANS Institute, a cybersecurity research and education organization in Bethesda, Md.

If the attackers were just interested in extortion or gaining customer data, there are easier targets, such as hospitals and e-commerce sites, Paller said. What the attackers may be doing with ERP systems is prepositioning, which can mean planting malware in a system for later use.

In other words, attackers “are not sure what they are going to do” once they get inside an ERP system, Paller said. But they would rather get inside the system now, and then try to gain access later, he said.

The report by Onapsis and Digital Shadows found an increase among hackers in ERP-specific vulnerabilities. This interest has been tracked on a variety of sources, including the dark web, which is a part of the internet accessible only through special networks.

Complexity makes ERP security difficult

The complexity of ERP applications makes it really hard and really costly to apply patches.
Juan Pablo Perez-EtchegoyenCTO, Onapsis

The problem facing ERP security, Perez-Etchegoyen said, is “the complexity of ERP applications makes it really hard and really costly to apply patches. That’s why some organizations are lagging behind.”

SAP and Oracle, in emailed responses to the report, both said something similar: Customers need to stay up-to-date on patches.

“Our recommendation to all of our customers is to implement SAP security patches as soon as they are available — typically on the second Tuesday of every month — to protect SAP infrastructure from attacks,” SAP said.

Oracle pointed out that it “issued security updates for the vulnerabilities listed in this report in July and in October of last year. The Critical Patch Update is the primary mechanism for the release of all security bug fixes for Oracle products. Oracle continues to investigate means to make applying security patches as easy as possible for customers.”

One of the problems is knowing the intent of the attackers, and the report cited a full range of motives, including cyberespionage, which is sabotage by a variety of groups, from hacktivists to foreign countries.

Next wave of attacks could be destructive

But one fear is the next wave of major attacks will attempt to destroy or cause real damage to systems and operations.

This concern was something Edward Amoroso, retired senior vice president and CSO of AT&T, warned about.

In a widely cited open letter in November 2017 to then-President-elect Donald Trump, Amoroso said attacks “will shift from the theft of intellectual property to destructive attacks aimed at disrupting our ability to live as free American citizens.” The ERP security report’s findings were consistent with his earlier warning, he said in an email.

Foreign countries know that “companies like SAP, Oracle and the like are natural targets to get info on American business,” Amoroso said. “All ERP companies understand this risk, of course, and tend to have good IT security departments. But going up against military actors is tough.”

Amoroso’s point about the risk of a destructive attack was specifically cited and backed by a subsequent MIT report, “Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors.”  The MIT report warned that attackers enjoy “inherent advantages owing to human fallibility, architectural flaws in the internet and the devices connected to it.”

For Sale – 2012 Mac Mini i7 Quad Core


I am just seeing if anyone would be interested in this:

I have a late 2012 Mac Mini i7 Quad Core 2.3GHz for sale – it has 16GB RAM and a 250GB SSD I(Samsung SSD850 EVO – professionally installed by a Mac specialist) Hard drive.

It is running High Sierra and I have the original packaging and it is in overall excellent condition with very light use over the past 2 years (hence the sale).

I would be looking for £500
Thought I would try here before it goes to the other auction site!

Price and currency: 500
Delivery: Delivery cost is not included
Payment method: Pay pal or bank transfer
Location: West Sussex
Advertised elsewhere?: Not advertised elsewhere
Prefer goods collected?: I have no preference

This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads.

  • Name and address including postcode
  • Valid e-mail address


For Sale – 2012 Mac Mini i7 Quad Core


I am just seeing if anyone would be interested in this:



I would be looking for £500

Price and currency: 500
Delivery: Delivery cost is not included
Payment method: Pay pal or bank transfer
Location: West Sussex
Advertised elsewhere?: Not advertised elsewhere
Prefer goods collected?: I have no preference

This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads.

  • Name and address including postcode
  • Valid e-mail address


Fixing Erratic Behavior on Hyper-V with Network Load Balancers

For years, I’d never heard of this problem. Then, suddenly, I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s not easy to precisely outline a symptom tree for you. Networked applications will behave oddly. Remote desktop sessions may skip or hang. Some network traffic will not pass at all. Other traffic will behave erratically. Rather than try to give you a thorough symptom tree, we’ll just describe the setup that can be addressed with the contents of this article: you’re using Hyper-V with a third-party network load balancer and experiencing network-related problems.


Before I ever encountered it, the problem was described to me by one my readers. Check out our Complete Guide to Hyper-V Networking article and look in the comments section for Jahn’s input. I had a different experience, but that conversation helped me reach a resolution much more quickly.

Problem Reproduction Instructions

The problem may appear under other conditions, but should always occur under these:

  • The network adapters that host the Hyper-V virtual switch are configured in a team
    • Load-balancing algorithm: Dynamic
    • Teaming mode: Switch Independent (likely occurs with switch-embedded teaming as well)
  • Traffic to/from affected virtual machines passes through a third-party load-balancer
    • Load balancer uses a MAC-based system for load balancing and source verification
      • Citrix Netscaler calls its feature “MAC based forwarding”
      • F5 load balancers call it “auto last hop”
    • The load balancer’s “internal” IP address is on the same subnet as the virtual machine’s
  • Sufficient traffic must be exiting the virtual machine for Hyper-V to load balance some of it to a different physical adapter

I’ll go into more detail later. This list should help you determine if you’re looking at an article that can help you.


Fixing the problem is very easy, and can be done without downtime. I’ll show the options in preference order. I’ll explain the impacting differences later.

Option 1: Change the Load-Balancing Algorithm

Your best bet is to change the load-balancing algorithm to “Hyper-V port”. You can change it in the lbfoadmin.exe graphical interface if your management operating system is GUI-mode Windows Server. To change it with PowerShell (assuming only one team):

There will be a brief interruption of networking while the change is made. It won’t be as bad as the network problems that you’re already experiencing.

Option 2: Change the Teaming Mode

Your second option is to change your teaming mode. It’s more involved because you’ll also need to update your physical infrastructure to match. I’ve always been able to do that without downtime as long as I changed the physical switch first, but I can’t promise the same for anyone else.

Decide if you want to use Static teaming or LACP teaming. Configure your physical switch accordingly.

Change your Hyper-V host to use the same mode. If your Hyper-V system’s management operating system is Windows Server GUI, you can use lbfoadmin.exe. To change it in PowerShell (assuming only one team):


In this context, it makes no difference whether you pick static or LACP. If you want more information, read our article on the teaming modes.

Option 3: Disable the Feature on the Load Balancer

You could tell the load balancer to stop trying to be clever. In general, I would choose that option last.

An Investigation of the Problem

So, what’s going on? What caused all this? If you’ve got an environment that matches the one that I described, then you’ve unintentionally created the perfect conditions for a storm.

Whose fault is it? In this case, I don’t really think that it’s fair to assign fault. Everyone involved is trying to make your network traffic go faster. They sometimes do that by playing fast and loose in that gray area between Ethernet and TCP/IP. We have lots of standards that govern each individually, but not so many that apply to the ways that they can interact. The problem arises because Microsoft is playing one game while your load balancer plays another. The games have different rules, and neither side is aware that another game is afoot.

Traffic Leaving the Virtual Machine

We’ll start on the Windows guest side (also applies to Linux). Your application inside your virtual machine wants to send some data to another computer. That goes something like this:

  1. Application: “Network, send this data to computer www.altaro.com on port 443”.
  2. Network: “DNS server, get me the IP for www.altaro.com”
  3. Network: “IP layer, determine if the IP address for www.altaro.com is on the same subnet”
  4. Network: “IP layer, send this packet to the gateway”
  5. IP layer passes downward for packaging in an Ethernet frame
  6. Ethernet layer transfers the frame

The part to understand: your application and your operating system don’t really care about the Ethernet part. Whatever happens down there just happens. Especially, it doesn’t care at all about the source MAC.


Traffic Crossing the Hyper-V Virtual Switch

Because this particular Ethernet frame is coming out of a Hyper-V virtual machine, the first thing that it encounters is the Hyper-V virtual switch. In our scenario, the Hyper-V virtual switch rests atop a team of network adapters. As you’ll recall, that team is configured to use the Dynamic load balancing algorithm in Switch Independent mode. The algorithm decides if load balancing can be applied. The teaming mode decides which pathway to use and if it needs to repackage the outbound frame.

Switch independent mode means that the physical switch doesn’t know anything about a team. It only knows about two or more Ethernet endpoints connected in standard access mode. A port in that mode can “host” any number of MAC addresses;the physical switch’s capability defines the limit. However, the same MAC address cannot appear on multiple access ports simultaneously. Allowing that would cause all sorts of problems.


So, if the team wants to load balance traffic coming out of a virtual machine, it needs to ensure that the traffic has a source MAC address that won’t cause the physical switch to panic. For traffic going out anything other than the primary adapter, it uses the MAC address of the physical adapter.


So, no matter how many physical adapters the team owns, one of two things will happen for each outbound frame:

  • The team will choose to use the physical adapter that the virtual machine’s network adapter is registered on. The Ethernet frame will travel as-is. That means that its source MAC address will be exactly the same as the virtual network adapter’s (meaning, not repackaged)
  • The team will choose to use an adapter other than the one that the virtual machine’s network adapter is registered on. The Ethernet frame will be altered. The source MAC address will be replaced with the MAC address of the physical adapter

Note: The visualization does not cover all scenarios. A virtual network adapter might be affinitized to the second physical adapter. If so, its load balanced packets would travel out of the shown “pNIC1” and use that physical adapter’s MAC as a source.

Traffic Crossing the Load Balancer

So, our frame arrives at the load balancer. The load balancer has a really crummy job. It needs to make traffic go faster, not slower. And, it acts like a TCP/IP router. Routers need to unpackage inbound Ethernet frames, look at their IP information, and make decisions on how to transmit them. That requires compute power and time.


If it needs too much time to do all this, then people would prefer to live without the load balancer. That means that the load balancer’s manufacturer doesn’t sell any units, doesn’t make any money, and goes out of business. So, they come up with all sorts of tricks to make traffic faster. One way to do that is by not doing quite so much work on the Ethernet frame. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea:


Essentially, the load balancer only needs to remember which MAC address sent which frame, and then it doesn’t need to worry so much about all that IP nonsense (it’s really more complicated than that, but this is close enough).

The Hyper-V/Load Balancer Collision

Now we’ve arrived at the core of the problem: Hyper-V sends traffic from virtual machines using source MAC addresses that don’t belong to those virtual machines. The MAC addresses belong to the physical NIC. When the load balancer tries to associate that traffic with the MAC address of the physical NIC, everything breaks.

Trying to be helpful (remember that), the load balancer attempts to return what it deems as “response” traffic to the MAC that initiated the conversation. The MAC, in this case, belongs directly to that second physical NIC. It wasn’t expecting the traffic that’s now coming in, so it silently discards the frame.

That happens because:

  • The Windows Server network teaming load balancing algorithms are send only; they will not perform reverse translations. There are lots of reasons for that and they are all good, so don’t get upset with Microsoft. Besides, it’s not like anyone else does things differently.
  • Because the inbound Ethernet frame is not reverse-translated, its destination MAC belongs to a physical NIC. The Hyper-V virtual switch will not send any Ethernet frame to a virtual network adapter unless it owns the destination MAC
  • In typical system-to-system communications, the “responding” system would have sent its traffic to the IP address of the virtual machine. Through the normal course of typical networking, that traffic’s destination MAC would always belong to the virtual machine. It’s only because your load balancer is trying to speed things along that the frame is being sent to the physical NIC’s MAC address. Otherwise, the source MAC of the original frame would have been little more than trivia.

Stated a bit more simply: Windows Server network teaming doesn’t know that anyone cares about its frames’ source MAC addresses and the load balancer doesn’t know that anyone is lying about their MAC addresses.

Why Hyper-V Port Mode Fixes the Problem

When you select the Hyper-V port load balancing algorithm in combination with the switch independent teaming mode, each virtual network adapter’s MAC address is registered on a single physical network adapter. That’s the same behavior that Dynamic uses. However, no load balancing is done for any given virtual network adapter; all traffic entering and exiting any given virtual adapter will always use the same physical adapter. The team achieves load balancing by placing each virtual network adapter across its physical members in a round-robin fashion.


Source MACs will always be those of their respective virtual adapters, so there’s nothing to get confused about.

I like this mode as a solution because it does a good job addressing the issue without making any other changes to your infrastructure. The drawback would be if you only had a few virtual network adapters and weren’t getting the best distribution. For a 10GbE system, I wouldn’t worry.

Why Static and LACP Fix the Problem

Static and LACP teaming involve your Windows Server system and the physical switch agreeing on a single logical pathway that consists of multiple physical pathways. All MAC addresses are registered on that logical pathway. Therefore, the Windows Server team has no need of performing any source MAC substitution regardless of the load balancing algorithm that you choose.


Since no MAC substitution occurs here, the load balancer won’t get anything confused.

I don’t like this method as much. It means modifying your physical infrastructure. I’ve noticed that some physical switches don’t like the LACP failover process very much. I’ve encountered some that need a minute or more to notice that a physical link was down and react accordingly. With every physical switch that I’ve used or heard of, the switch independent mode fails over almost instantly.

That said, using a static or LACP team will allow you to continue using the Dynamic load balancing algorithm. All else being equal, you’ll get a more even load balancing distribution with Dynamic than you will with Hyper-V port mode.

Why You Should Let the Load Balancer Do Its Job

The third listed resolution suggests disabling the related feature on your load balancer. I don’t like that option, personally. I don’t have much experience with the Citrix product, but I know that the F5 buries their “Auto Last Hop” feature fairly deeply. Also, these two manufacturers enable the feature by default. It won’t be obvious to a maintainer that you’ve made the change.

However, your situation might dictate that disabling the load balancer’s feature causes fewer problems than changing the Hyper-V or physical switch configuration. Do what works best for you.

Using a Different Internal Router Also Addresses the Issue

In all of these scenarios, the load balancer performs routing. Actually, these types of load balancers always perform routing, because they present a single IP address for the service to the outside world and translate internally to the back-end systems.

However, nothing states that the internal source IP address of the load balancer must exist in the same subnet as the back-end virtual machines. You might do that for performance reasons; as I said above, routing incurs overhead. However, this all a known quantity and modern routers are pretty good at what they do. If any router is present between the load balancer and the back-end virtual machines, then the MAC address issue will sort itself out regardless of your load balancing and teaming mode selections.

Have You Experienced this Phenomenon?

If so, I’d love to hear from you. What system did you experience it happening? How did you resolve the situation (if you were able)? Perhaps you’ve just encountered it and arrived here to get a solution – if so let me know if this explanation was helpful or if you need any further assistance regarding your particular environment. The comment section below awaits.

An intelligent approach to building your AI practice – Microsoft Partner Network


While seeing how partners build out and customize any technology for their customers always intrigues me, I’m particularly fascinated by how AI will transform businesses. Many of the solutions being built with the Microsoft AI platform have not only led to business growth, but also make our lives safer, healthier, and more enjoyable.

Partners can build a roadmap that helps customers layer in sophisticated AI capabilities with minimal training. With so many entry points for developers to add value, IDC predicts 75 percent of developer teams will include cognitive and AI functionality in one or more applications in 2018.

Introducing our new AI Playbook

To assist in building an AI-focused practice, we’ve launched the AI Practice Development Playbook with guidance and resources around developing your strategy, gaining skills, and marketing and selling your service offerings. Written in conjunction with Microsoft partner Solliance and other AI experts that shared their experiences and best practices, the playbook also pulls in research from a recent MDC survey of 555 partners.

AI is a transformative technology that spans all verticals and company sizes. Our goal is to amplify human ingenuity with intelligent technology by infusing AI into everything we do, driving AI innovation that extends individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and makes them more productive. And as you deepen the engagement and AI becomes more and more integrated into your customers’ operations, your intelligent solutions can create enormous barriers to entry for your competitors.

Achieving such differentiation can be easier and faster than you might think. Here’s an example of a partner that leveraged one of our Cognitive Services APIs to quickly build and implement its AI solution.

Filling a gap for Hollywood

InterKnowlogy, a leader in custom app development, took its expertise in computer vison and sentiment analysis in a new direction when it partnered with 1457 Investment Group to devise a better way for studios to conduct advance movie screenings. These screenings are an invaluable way to get public feedback in time to make changes before a picture is released, but the current process has two drawbacks: It’s limited to people who are local (not necessarily a good indicator of national sentiment); and it requires interviewers to ask follow-up questions of each subject.

InterKnowlogy’s solution allows studios to conduct screenings on turnkey Surface devices that can be sent anywhere. Then the magic happens: As the content plays, the application uses the Azure-based Cognitive Services Face API to determine how engaged the viewer is and what percentage of time they spend viewing the film. It also captures facial expressions such as happiness, sadness, neutral, surprise, contempt, anger, disgust, and fear. The solution makes sure the viewer is authorized to see the film, and automatically stops playing if they are not. Universal Windows Platform API’s are used to track the viewer’s face, and pause playback if more than one face is detected.

All data is cached locally and then persisted to structured storage in Azure SQL Server to be visualized, analyzed, and reported on using Power BI. The Cognitive Services Video Indexer service can quickly slice and dice films so that insights on speech sentiment, keywords, and even actor identification can be visualized and played back in “video scrubber” format.

“Solutions like this would have been impossible for us to build just a couple of years ago. With AI, new problems can be tackled and solutions can be built in weeks versus months and have fewer zeroes in the final cost.  These are exciting times for Microsoft partners like us.”

— Rodney Guzman, Co-Founder and CEO, InterKnowlogy

Expand Your Practice with AI

As I wrote recently, many of these new applications have human elements that enhance our lives. But partners also use AI technologies pragmatically to differentiate their current services, so they can re-engage customers with enhanced end-to-end systems that learn from data to deliver new insights and efficiencies.

Imagine how your current services could be enhanced with machine learning, computer vision, natural language communication with chat bots, or speech recognition. Your AI practice can be an extension of your current data and advanced analytics practice. And Microsoft’s AI platform, which includes all the tools needed to create, build, and add intelligent capabilities to your applications, can support your efforts to create AI solutions.

The playbook goes into the AI Maturity Model and shows how to launch your AI practice with pre-built APIs and transform core business processes with custom modeling and algorithms, eventually building packaged vertical solutions. It offers real partner examples of industry AI solutions in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail, government, and education. And it goes into the cloud AI business models and provides guidance on designing your solutions.

AI represents a huge partner opportunity to grow existing practices and launch new services. I hope the playbook helps you envision your own use cases and sets you up for the future of intelligent solutions.

Share your thoughts with the Microsoft Partner Community.

AI Practice Development Playbook State of the Channel Opportunities for partners in 2018

Updated with currency and color recognition, Seeing AI is available in 35 countries

iPhone with Seeing AI app

Since we first made Seeing AI available, there’s been 100,000 downloads of the app and it has assisted users with over 3 million tasks. We have never been more humbled by your feedback and are encouraged to do more! When we first released this, we launched with features such as the ability to hear what a product is via audibly locating the barcode, describing images, text and faces of friends and family as they come into view. Today, we’re excited to announce new features coming to the app that will build on these early results, provide new user experiences and allow us to continue to learn and innovate. These new features, such as currency, handwriting and color recognition, as well as light detection, are now available in the app in 35 countries, including the European Union.

Some of the new features now available in Seeing AI include:

  • Color recognition: Getting dressed in the morning just got easier with this new feature, which describes the color of objects, like garments in your closet.
  • Currency recognition: Seeing AI can now recognize the currency of US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds and Euros. Checking how much change is in your pocket or leaving a cash tip at a restaurant is much easier.
  • Musical light detector: The app alerts you with a corresponding audible tone when you aim the phone’s camera at light in the environment. A newly convenient tool so you don’t have to touch hot bulbs to know that a light is switched off, or the battery pack’s LED is on.
  • Handwriting recognition: Expanding on the ability of the app to read printed text, such as on menus or signs, the newly improved ability to read handwriting means you can read personal notes in a greeting card, as well as printed stylized text not usually readable by optical character recognition.
  • Reading documents: Seeing AI can read you the document aloud without voiceover, with synchronized word highlighting. Also, it includes the ability to change the text size on the Document channel.
  • Ability to choose voices and speed: Personalization is key, and when you’re not using VoiceOver, this feature lets you choose between the voice that is used and how fast it talks.

With each of these new features, we make sure to protect personal data while ensuring the technology operates effectively and provides users the best experiences with our products. If you have questions, the Microsoft Privacy Statement explains how Microsoft collects, stores and uses personal information.

We continue to hear from you how Seeing AI is bringing value to your life. It’s more than humbling. Cameron Roles, a university lecturer at the Australian National University College of Law, believes there’s never been a better time in history to be a blind person.

“I absolutely love Seeing AI. If my children hand me a note from school or if I pick up a book, I can use Seeing AI to quickly capture that text and just give me a very brief instant overview of what’s on the document,” said Roles of the important capability the app has for reading text and handwriting. “I can quickly be right on top of it.”

“For me, I think we’re coming into a really exciting time,” said Roles. “The growth in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, self-driving cars… I feel that it’s a great time for all of us in society.”

“Technology can be such an enabler of good and such an enabler for people to shrink the world, for the world to come closer together, and for people to be able to achieve so much more than they ever could without it,” said Roles.

We’re excited to share these features and look forward to hearing from you who Seeing AI is making your world more inclusive. Its available in Apple’s App Store in 35 countries and when a new version is released, you will be shown the list of new features when you next launch the app.

Please if you have feedback, we want to hear it! This started as a prototype just a year ago, and while we’ve been thrilled with the progress, we know we have a long way to go. Please send your thoughts, feedback or questions to seeingai@microsoft.com.

If you have further questions or feedback, please contact the Disability Answer Desk. The Disability Answer Desk is there to assist via phone and chat, and in the United States, we also have an ASL option for our customers with hearing loss (+1 503-427-1234).

Microsoft’s Seeing AI app now available in Australia, Ireland and UK

Microsoft’s Seeing AI app, which helps people who are blind and partially sighted by narrating the world around them, is now available for free download to people in Australia, Ireland and the UK via the Apple iOS store.

Seeing AI is designed to help people who are blind or have visual impairments use artificial intelligence to recognize objects, people and text via a phone or tablet’s camera and describes them.

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The app is now available for iOS devices in the Australia, Ireland and the UK, after being released in the United States, Canada, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore earlier this year.

You can read more about Seeing AI via Microsoft News Centre Australia or Microsoft News Centre UK.

Generation at risk of falling behind in tech skills unless computing education funding improves, report finds

A tenfold increase in computing education funding is needed or the UK risks seeing an entire generation fail to have the technology skills needed for the future, a new report has found.

The Royal Society study, which was co-funded by Microsoft, found that more than half of schools in England do not offer a GCSE in Computer Science, leaving many young people without critical experience in coding and programming.

It is estimated that around 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet, and these will require skills in areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In order to prepare the next generation for advances in technology, the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, said more than £60 million needed to be injected into computing education over the next five years – a tenfold increase from current levels. This would give the area the same support as maths and physics.

School provision of GCSE Computing in 2015-16

Cindy Rose, Chief Executive of Microsoft UK, said: “Microsoft is dramatically scaling up its digital skills programme in the UK and we believe now is the time for the Government to do the same. The risk, if we don’t make these investments now, is that too many young people struggle to access new opportunities, and the UK loses its advantage in a world being transformed by technology.”

The report (below), which was also part-funded by Google and led by world-famous engineer Steve Furber, found that:

  • 54% of English schools do not offer Computer Science GCSE
  • 30% of English GCSE pupils attend a school that does not offer Computer Science GCSE – the equivalent of 175,000 pupils each year, almost a third of the total number in England
  • Bournemouth leads England with the highest uptake of Computer Science GCSE (23% of all pupils), with Kensington & Chelsea, Blackburn and City of London coming last
  • England meets only 68% of its recruitment target for entries into computing teacher training courses, lower than Physics and Classics
  • Only one-in-five Computer Science GCSE pupils is female

Only 11% of Key Stage 4 students took GCSE Computer Science (62,703 out of a total of 588,000) in 2017. The report also found that more than half of schools in England (2,703 out of a total of 5,135) do not offer Computer Science GCSE at all.

At local authority level, Bournemouth leads England with the highest uptake of GCSE Computer Science (23% of all pupils at Key Stage 4), followed by Central Bedfordshire (22%), Hartlepool (22%), Knowsley (20%) and Slough (20%). The City of London has the lowest uptake (4%) followed by Blackburn (5%), Kensington & Chelsea (5%), Carderdale (5%) and Rutland (5%).

The report also found that two-in-three schools in Hackney do not offer Computer Science at GCSE level, despite being located near the Silicon Roundabout, London’s tech hub. Nearby Islington only had six out of 14 schools offering the subject.

The Isles of Scilly (100%), Hartlepool (71%), Harrow (67%) and Bracknell Forest (67%) are the local authorities with the highest proportion of schools offering Computer Science GCSE, while Kensington & Chelsea (18%) sits at the bottom of the list, followed by Tower Hamlets (27%), Shropshire (27%), Rutland (29%) and Greenwich (29%).

The report, which was based on a survey, in-depth meetings with teachers and Government data, suggests that part of the problem with computing education is a lack of knowledge about the fast-paced technology sector among staff. One-in-four secondary school teachers surveyed took no professional development activities to enhance their knowledge of computing. The Government allocates just £1.2 million a year to training existing computing teachers, and the Royal Society called on the government to provide enough funding to train 8,000 secondary school computing teachers.

The Royal Society also found that just 20% of GCSE Computer Science candidates were female, falling to 10% at A-level

“For pupils to thrive, we need knowledgeable, highly skilled teachers,” Furber said. “The report paints a bleak picture in England, which meets only 68% of its computing teacher recruitment targets and where, as a result, one-in-two schools doesn’t offer Computer Science at GCSE, a crucial stage of young people’s education.”

Teachers told the Royal Society they are most confident with parts of the computing curriculum inherited from previous Information and Communications Technology courses, and 44% feel more confident in delivering the earlier stages of the curriculum.

Computing teachers are also in short supply, with the government meeting only 68% of its recruitment target for entrants to computing teacher training courses in England between 2012 and 2017. In Scotland, the number of computer science teachers has fallen by 25% in the past 10 years. There is also a shortage of trainees with enough specialist knowledge to teach a technical subject. While there are 65 Physics and 93 Maths teacher conversion courses available, none exists for computing. The Royal Society is calling for government funding on top of the £60 million to set up conversion courses so there is no personal cost to teachers and schools.

Student uptake of GCSE Computing in 2015-16

Reinforcing previous reports on the gender divide in computing lessons, the Royal Society also found that just 20% of GCSE Computer Science candidates were female, falling to 10% at A-level. There is a similar picture in Scotland, with a 20% female uptake at National 5. Chinese pupils and those from other Asian backgrounds are significantly more likely than white pupils and black pupils to study GCSE Computer Science (12.7% vs 7.5%, 5.5% and 4.1% respectively).


“Overhauling the fragile state of our computing education will require an ambitious, multipronged approach. We need to invest significantly more to support and train 8,000 secondary school computing teachers to ensure pupils have the skills and knowledge needed for the future.”

Girls work in school lab, with laptop on table showing science website
The Royal Society wants support for Computer Science to be on a par with maths and physics

Microsoft President Brad Smith told the CBI Annual Conference earlier this week that technology skills were in demand in the UK, and companies and that people of all ages needed to acquire the right knowledge and experience.

“It’s clear that 90% of jobs will need new digital skills; and it’s clear that employees don’t have the skills that employers require,” he told hundreds of business leaders at the event in London.

“That starts with bringing new skills into schools, bringing new initiatives like Computing at School, a programme we have been proud to support. It’s a programme that does what needs to be done – create a new curriculum to teach a new subject and provide professional development.”

Microsoft has also launched a programme to teach digital skills to people across the UK, to ensure the country remains one of the global leaders in next-generation technologies.

Democratizing technology for an inclusive revolution – Asia News Center





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