Micron Associates: My week as an Amazon insider

The first item I see in Amazon's Swansea warehouse is a package of dog nappies. The second is a massive pink plastic dildo. The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon's standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK's largest, is 14 football pitches). It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap.

But then there are more than 100m items on its UK website: if you can possibly imagine it, Amazon sells it. And if you can't possibly imagine it, well, Amazon sells it too. To spend 10½ hours a day picking items off the shelves is to contemplate the darkest recesses of our consumerist desires, the wilder reaches of stuff, the things that money can buy: a One Direction charm bracelet, a dog onesie, a cat scratching post designed to look like a DJ's record deck, a banana slicer, a fake twig. I work mostly in the outsize "non-conveyable" section, the home of diabetic dog food, and bio-organic vegetarian dog food, and obese dog food; of 52in TVs, and six-packs of water shipped in from Fiji, and oversized sex toys – the 18in double dong (regular-sized sex toys are shelved in the sortables section).

On my second day, the manager tells us that we alone have picked and packed 155,000 items in the past 24 hours. Tomorrow, 2 December – the busiest online shopping day of the year – that figure will be closer to 450,000. And this is just one of eight warehouses across the country. Amazon took 3.5m orders on a single day last year. Christmas is its Vietnam – a test of its corporate mettle and the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet.

Source: Micron Associates

Micron Associates, Online shoppers warned of scam websites

The UK government has warned bargain hunters to be extra vigilant when searching for deals online this Black Friday and in the run-up to Christmas, confirming that cyber criminals netted more than £12m online during the same period last year.

The UK government issued the warning on Thursday, also revealing that its Action Fraud hotline received more than 10,000 reports about active cyber scams last year. Each scam reportedly earned the criminals an average of £1,700 per victim.

Dave Clark, detective chief superintendent of the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, highlighted scams masquerading as deals on technology products, like the Apple iPhone and iPad, as being particularly problematic.

"Online shopping has revolutionised the way we buy our Christmas presents, with each year more and more people choosing to search for gifts over the internet rather than heading to the shops. However, the result is that online fraud is top of the festive scam list," he said.

Source:  Micron Associates

Micron Associates - Forum to focus on GCC cybercrime

The seminar will discuss penetration, hacking attacks and advanced persistent threats, malware and spyware, denial of service attacks, risk scenarios in the cloud, social engineering risks, bring your own device (BYOD) risks, audits and risk assessments, key cyber security controls and BYOD best practices.

It has been designed to equip risk, compliance and fraud prevention professionals with the knowledge they need to combat these sophisticated crimes and mitigate the risk they pose.

The seminar is conducted in collaboration with the International Compliance Association, UK, and is funded under Tamkeen's conferences and seminars support scheme. "Increasing exposure of businesses to the Internet provides the advantage of publicising business offerings and promoting interaction between stakeholders," CBB information technology director Yousif Al Fadhel said.

"However, it also requires adequate security measures to be deployed in a timely manner to counter possible and reported risks to IT infrastructure across organisations. "It is hence mandatory for IT security officials to be well-informed about latest developments in IT security risks and remedies," he added.

Source:  Micron Associates