THE FORGE FROM A CYBERSECURITY PERSPECTIVE.

Hi, I’m Eunice and I’m a Christian who amongst other things loves to watch movies. I was returning from the just concluded Black and Blessed Conference hosted by my church Kingdom Diplomats while I was watching this new trendy Christian movie, The Forge. Very interesting movie by the way, there’s a lot to learn and I saw the character Isaiah portray everything all the preachers in the conference tried to inculcate in us last weekend.

However, it wasn’t only those values I saw in the movie. There as some cybersecurity practices I saw particularly in Joshua Moore’s company, Moore Fitness, that I’d like to share with you. Moore Fitness is a company that produces over 205 products for fitness eg weights, jump ropes, treads mills, etc. in parts to be assembled by suppliers.

The packing and shipping division has 24 staff including 1 manager, 1 software engineer, and 6 persons in the labeling and packaging department with rotatable roles. 10 floor robots and 75 storage robots. Some security practices include;

Physical security: The company is secured with security cameras and doors that use access cards to allow access. These cards are given strictly to employees, there are also caution warnings on the doors which aid security awareness e.g., knives are not allowed. While the access cards are a plus, the cards should only allow employees access to places within the building that the person requires to perform his duty. There should also be staff ladened with the responsibility of watching the cameras.

Network security: Moore Fitness uses a role-based access control system as Cody, the software engineer is able to access the robot systems from his home outside work hours which would not be possible using Attribute Based Access Control.

Internet Of Things: Moore Fitness uses robots to perform tasks to enhance productivity. My suggestion would be for those robots to be put on a different network, have regular password updates, and use strong passwords too. It is also seen that Moore Fitness carries out regular firmware updates without entirely crippling the availability of the robots as the bots were ongoing a firmware update. At the same time, Cody Joshua and his wife tried to comply with the impossible order.

Artificial Intelligence: This is used to aid security as the robots use artificial intelligence to detect when someone is in their way and stop to protect human life which is the number one goal of cybersecurity according to ISC2 and to prevent economic loss.

HR: New employees are onboarded and granted relevant access; this is seen as Isiah being granted an access card after his job offer is finalized. There is also job rotation and separation of duties.

Seeing that some information security practices are employed in Moore Fitness I’d like to assume that it has an existing Information Security Management System and the management is in buy-in as the CEO Joshua Moore is seen to use to access card himself. Moore Fitness has a team of engineers who develop the robots they use. I want to input that cybersecurity professionals should be included in this team to include security in the development life cycle and perform the necessary risk assessments before the products or software is deployed.

I also want to point out that information or cybersecurity must align with the company’s mission and must help to create value rather than drain the company’s revenue because businesses especially private businesses are created to earn profit. Maintaining business relationships and reputation is also a large part of that.

Hope you’ve learned something.