Protecting the Cheddar shows the dangers of an overnetworked business — especially the most secretive parts of their company, namely the cheese recipes. It also highlights the importance of diverse perspectives in the meeting room as the vulnerabilities would not have been caught if it wasn’t for Sara speaking up in a room full of men who scoffed at her.
Several other types of companies and products come to mind when thinking about risk to public safety due to overnetworked systems, including other food manufacturers like the cheddar company, therapy clinics, cleaning processes, and the manufacturing of harsh chemicals used only in labs.
I consider mental and physical health a part of the public well-being / safety. For therapy clinics, there are some elements that simply should not be logged onto the Internet under the person’s name: details of traumatic events, names of people in their lives who they discuss, confidential and/or negative thoughts about others, and similar sensitive information that is incredibly personal to the client or discusses their relationship with others. If this information was hacked and leaked, it’d be disastrous to all of the clients, not only having the potential to ruin relationships, but also posing a serious mental health risk. Other patient information should be carefully guarded, including their demographics and history with the clinic.
For those who manufacture harsh chemicals or even semi-harsh cleaning solutions, a small misstep or oversight could be dangerous — if not fatal — to those who work with them. If the mechanization that measures hydrogen peroxide fails or gets hacked and too much goes in, this could seriously injure those who end up working with the product. Humans make mistakes, so it’s alright that this is networked, but it should still be frequently checked and protected.
Lastly, I’m curious how the future of encrypted data might have changed this case study. I believe that the direct recipes should have never been stored online in the first place; they should have stored some sort of encrypted version of this data. That way, even if the hackers got into the system, they wouldn’t be able to know how to decrypt it — or at least would have a difficult time getting to it.
This case study truly shows how crucial (and business-saving) it is to have a variety of perspectives in the room. Based on where the conversation was going before she questioned the network in the first place, Chad likely would have funneled millions more dollars into “tightening the security” without ever making the rounds to check the different networks himself. They wouldn’t have worked with Parem, nor would they have found the vulnerabilities so quickly. The company would have lost its security moving forward, since they would be fortifying a system that wasn’t built to work.
Sara had to overcome a number of barriers just to speak: being the only woman in the room, not being high in the workplace ranks, and the intersection of the biases she faced. She singlehandedly saved the company, and I hope she was greatly rewarded, especially since she was met with rebuke when she spoke up in the first place. More than this, I hope that Chad saw how important it was to have different kinds of voices in the room in the future.
