EDITORIAL PUBLISHER SCOTT FILBY
EDITOR LAURENCE MARCHINI
A WELCOME RETURN ON THE CARDS
IS IT SAFE?
Funny, isn’t it? All those things that online media were going to sentence to the spam folder of history, and they are still there. Daily newspapers, trade magazines, books… the list is almost endless.
Suffice to say, the print catalogues have returned.
One thing that has certainly changed in the digital age is the mail.
And now I’m delighted to announce that another printed communication is making a long-overdue comeback – and this too is by popular demand. Industry Update Manufacturing Product Cards will be mailed to our magazine circulation in May this year.
It really wasn’t that long ago that we would all receive a mailbox full of “snail mail” each day, both at home and at work. But how many letters do you receive now? I’d wager it was only a tiny fraction of days gone by.
For the benefit of those too young to remember them (because it is several years since we’ve produced them) product cards are individual postcard-sized promotions, mailed out in a pack of 28.
This got me thinking, and last year we revived the idea of actually printing our media kit and mailing it out to all our advertisers, rather than just posting it online and sending out a link via email.
These unique cards are designed to grab the reader’s attention immediately, guaranteeing maximum response.
The results were fascinating. People remembered receiving it. And they kept it for reference – which was exactly the object of the exercise. Just like Industry Update magazine, which arrives on the reader’s desk at work and is kept for future reading, physical mail is perceived as having a greater value than electronic communications that pop up in an in-box. And, as a sidebar to that, of late I have spoken with several companies who had thought they could avoid the cost and palaver of printing a physical catalogue only to find that customers complained that searching an online catalogue was nothing like having the real thing in their hands.
How much response? Well, past product card advertisers have reported hundreds of responses. And one, an advertiser producing safety glasses reported more than 1000 responses. Product cards are great for promoting new products, special offers or new services. They are particularly useful for communicating things like company name changes or changes of contact details as readers are likely to pin them up on a noticeboard. We still have a few vacancies in the next pack of Industry Update Manufacturing Product Cards that will be mailed in May. Your name could be on one.
It’s one of the most chilling lines from the movies of the 20th century. My namesake and hometown hero Sir Laurence Olivier repeatedly asked Dustin Hoffman “Is it safe?” while torturing him in a dentist’s chair in the movie classic Marathon Man. Hoffman’s character’s problem was that he didn’t know what “it” was. So how could he answer? The recent story that reminded me of this particular movie scene was one from the world of cybersecurity. And it’s a story that just goes to show that in today’s IoT world, that unsafe “it” could be almost anything. It seems that last year, hackers from Check Point Research (fortunately the “good guys”) found that there were vulnerabilities in the ZigBee wireless protocols used to control a very mundane object – a smart lightbulb. The lamp in question, the Philips Hue, offers users the ability to control not only the brightness but also the colour of the illumination from a wirelessly connected control bridge. The Check Point hackers went on to demonstrate that it would be relatively easy for a malicious actor to take control of one of these devices wirelessly from anything up to 100m away. Once in control of the lightbulb, they simulated a malfunction in the lamp while
injecting malicious code that could be used to take over the control bridge for the lighting network once the user had rebooted the lamp to clear the fault. Once the control bridge had been taken over, they could than target any connected computer network. This would give them the opportunity to inject malware, ransomware and any other form of mischief into computers that might later be connected to a work network, or even a control system. So could a compromised lightbulb shut down a production line? It hardly seems likely, but it is certainly possible. Needless to say, the Check Point team revealed their findings to the manufacturer of the lightbulbs, which closed the loophole and issued a firmware security patch that would be automatically uploaded to all devices in the field. While that particular vulnerability has been resolved, it does go to show exactly how a security weak point in any connected device – however insignificant – could be exploited to attack major IT and OT assets. With more and more devices joining the Internet of Things each day, we really should all be asking ourselves “Is it safe?”… just as soon as we can work out what “it” is.
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FEBRUARY / MARCH 2020
