We live in a crazy world. By watching the news on any given day, you easily can be convinced that the majority of humans are evil and there are few good, sane people left among us. From road rage to street violence to ambushing police officers to school and night club shootings to cyberattacks to threats to and from North Korea, it’s amazing we aren’t all building fallout shelters and preparing for the apocalypse.
In March of this year, retrofit experienced one of the aforementioned threats firsthand. To my colleagues and my untrained eyes, our websites—www.retrofitmagazine.com and www.retrofitTV.com—simply were running unusually slow that morning. However, our web guru, Derek Leeds, noticed a significant number of malicious requests on the server that hosted both sites. He went to work making adjustments to the network and plugins, moving retrofitTV to its own private server and adding new firewalls. His actions didn’t stop the sites from being attacked, however. Leeds began blocking specific countries and specific IP addresses that were trying to access our websites’ login pages. He also set up our websites to only accept specific IP addresses for login. Eventually, the crisis was averted.
Fisher Media, publisher of retrofit, is a small company without a brick and mortar building. The company is not sitting on the next “Game of Thrones” script, the combination to Fort Knox’s vault or any political secrets. Yet, Fisher Media was cyberattacked, and it’s likely your business has been, too. Robert Nieminen, retrofit’s contributing editor, writes in “Trend Alert” that “a recent Accenture security survey … found that overconfidence may be putting companies at greater risk for cyberattacks. … Of the companies surveyed, cyberattacks were carried out at a rate of three times per month during the past year alone.”
Nieminen notes hackers are looking for low-hanging fruit and don’t always know who or what they’re attacking, thus the attack on retrofit’s sites. However, they are looking to inflict damage once they get into your network. Commercial buildings, which automate so many systems in this Internet of Things era, definitely face cybersecurity risks. Nieminen outlines the common pitfalls and what you can do if you’re hacked in his article.
Nameless, faceless villains behind computers aren’t the only criminals we have to fear. Gun violence has become all too common, and protecting our nation’s children within their schools, unfortunately, has become a critical topic of conversation. In “Component”, John Woestman, director of Codes & Government Affairs for the Builders Hardware Manufacturers Association (BHMA), New York, underscores the importance of specifying classroom door locksets that meet ANSI/BHMA standards when designing and retrofitting school buildings. He notes, “Door barricade devices are currently being made available to—and installed by—some school districts despite the fact that they may violate building codes, fire codes, life-safety codes and/or accessibility laws.” Ultimately, these door barricades—rather than protecting students, teachers and others—actually may compromise their safety in other terrible events, like fires. Learn more about what locksets you should be specifying in Woestman’s article.
Finally, retrofit’s entire team would like to thank Derek Leeds not only for remaining vigilant and protecting our websites from malicious bots, but also for protecting our country. Leeds currently is deployed with the Army National Guard in Kuwait. We thank him for his service in this time of international uncertainty.