Arup

What Arup is

Arup, officially Arup Group Limited, is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London. It provides design, engineering, architecture, planning and advisory services.^[1] The firm has participated in projects in more than 160 countries, so its work is not tied to a single market.^[1]

A firm of this kind usually does not build the structures itself. It supplies the design, calculation and technical advice that a project needs, from early planning through construction.^[1]

Origins

Arup was established in 1946 by Sir Ove Arup as Ove N. Arup Consulting Engineers.^[1] The company still carries his name.

Ownership and people

Arup's ownership is structured as a trust whose beneficiaries are its past and present employees.^[1] A trust holds assets on behalf of beneficiaries; in this case, the people who work or have worked for the firm stand in that position rather than outside owners.

The firm employs about 17,000 people in over 90 offices across 35 countries.^[1]

In 1963 Arup formed a new division, Arup Associates, together with the architect Philip Dowson.^[1]

Landmark projects

Arup became well known for complex projects such as the Sydney Opera House, on which it consulted on structural engineering.^[1][2] It was also responsible for landmarks such as the Bird's Nest stadium, the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.^[2]

Complex structures are demanding because engineers have to work out how forces travel through an unusual shape, whether the building will stand up, and how it will behave over time. When the form of a building has few precedents, much of that analysis has to be built up from first principles rather than copied from an earlier job.

Deepfake fraud at the Hong Kong office

Arup's Hong Kong office was the target of a deepfake fraud, in which an employee paid out about US$25.6 million.^[2] A deepfake is manipulated video or audio, produced with the help of machine learning, that shows a person saying or doing something they never said or did.

Arup's global chief information officer Rob Greig said the number and sophistication of attacks — including invoice fraud, phishing scams, WhatsApp voice spoofing and deepfakes — had been rising sharply.^[2] Arup East Asia regional chairman Michael Kwok said in an internal memo that the frequency and sophistication of such attacks are rapidly increasing globally.^[2]

Invoice fraud generally involves a fake bill sent in the name of a supplier or partner, while phishing uses forged messages to obtain credentials or authorize a payment. Neither trick is new; what changes the arithmetic is how cheaply and convincingly a person can now be imitated. For large organizations, the episode is a reminder that machine-generated impersonation has become a practical risk rather than a technical curiosity.