Everyone is vulnerable to hacking, but when you’re a small business the effects and cost of recovery can be considerable. You just don’t want to take the chance, so we needed to convey some urgency to businesses to get Hiscox Cyber Insurance. The solution was to move hacking out of the shadows and into the spotlight – by visualising it via real time data generated from hacking attempts on our posters. For the first time a poster was connected to live servers. These servers were of the same specification as a small business might use. The server ports were left open to tempt hackers and bots to ping what they thought maybe a real businesses network, our servers sent a message back authenticating we were online, and so the hackers attempted to gain entry, not realising each hit on out network was being displayed in real time on our posters and generating our creative. It was the data generated by individual hacks which powered our whole creative platform.

The data was gathered via honeypot servers connected to the outdoor sites. The servers were completely unadvertised, but left with open ports. Anyone [or bot] trying to gain access to one of those ports, got a response to the request to input a username and a password, mimicking a genuine SME server. If they then initiated a request back to that same port [trying to guess the entry] it was determined as a hack threat and logged. The behaviour of our dynamic headline was dependant on the volume of hacks. A code was written that told the dots of the headline to react from mild through to meltdown. Over the 8 days the posters were live the creative detoriated. The hacking data destroying the headline. A counter let passers by see the total amount of hacks – which after just 8 days had climbed to over 195,000 hacks

The posters added a new dynamic to real time. Viewers getting a real insight into just how prevalent hacking is. Over the course of just over a week, the posters were hacked more than 195,000 times –

17851, 19/02/2018

14598, 20/02/2018

19116, 21/02/2018

18357, 22/02/2018

23921, 23/02/2018

65130, 24/02/2018

36277, 25/02/2018

23511, 26/02/2018

With an average of 27,892 per day. Plus, as a bonus, garnered a large amount of positive PR.