It seems as though anything that is connected to a network online, that has login through web portals and other online access points, can and will be hacked at some point. I remember seeing a map when I was a freshman in high school that a peer interested in cybersecurity sent me. I wasn’t sure how reliable such a map could be, but I felt a creeping anxiety as I watched lines of color shoot out from places across the map aimed at the US. Of these many vectors moving across the screen, how many of them were successful in their attempts?
Knowing so little about cybersecurity and hacking, I’m unsure how it even works. Is anything that uses the internet able to be hacked? What digital systems aren’t able to be hacked? There are systems that would risk lives if shut down like hospitals or our emergency services. I assume these are both vulnerable to bad actors. I’m not sure how catastrophic leaked patient information would be as opposed to physical systems in the hospital like access to that information or door and security systems. I think anything that would bar hospitals from running properly should not have access to the Internet like security cameras, door systems, etc. Logins to view patient information should be carefully guarded. If that access is somehow taken away from hospitals it could prevent them from delivering crucial care. For emergency services, there isn’t a way for that to operate offline. Dispatchers need to be able to locate callers and send that location to responders.
If Sara had stayed quiet, the CEO may not have hired a technology consultant to look through their systems. They would have prevented tension amongst executives, but they would have remained vulnerable to the threats that the tech consultant discovered. The assumptions that she challenged were technical and hierarchical as she doesn’t know much about the network underlying the Newhouse Cheese Company and its manufacturing systems. She is also beneath the COO in job position as well as one of the few women in the room. Sara’s comment was important because she had a perspective no one else in the room did. By lacking knowledge about the system, she could question the approach entirely—she didn’t have stake in keeping everything online. She also went up against the condescension from the head of engineering and the rest of the people in the room and showed them that their opinions weren’t the only credible ones in the room.
