Hiscox own research found that SMEs are disproportionately affected by cyber crime. Hiscox found two thirds of respondents rank cyber threats and fraud as the top risks to their business. Despite this, 7 out of 10 businesses failed the cyber readiness model that Hiscox developed, and only 11% of businesses surveyed qualified as experts.

The question was, how could we illustrate the need for something as invisible but as vital as cyber insurance for small businesses? We set out to reach small businesses and illustrate the very real threat they face from cyber-attacks, and demonstrate how they can protect themselves.

The groundbreaking campaign would use live data from a honeypot set up to mimic an SME to deliver the powerful message - Every pulsing dot represents a live cyber attack, letting the public know the accumulative total of attacks the server received each day the campaign was live.

We challenged ourselves to create our own servers, typical of an SME setup, to act as honeypot and tempt the hackers in. The complexity of the project came in the configuration of data feeds from our honeypot and the myriad of differing integrations required at each of the 37 digital screens we were using as our Honeypot Network.

The project took well over 400 hours of work to complete from a team of designers, developers, producers and technicians. 88 hours of this time purely devoted to quality assurance and testing to ensure the seamless execution on each screen for the duration of the campaign.

Our groundbreaking solution enabled us to distribute the data feed directly from our honeypot to our network of 37 digital posters across the UK in real-time for an entire week with zero downtime.

The Honeypot posters were live for 7 days from 19th February 2018.

In just one week our servers were attacked over 195,000 times, that’s the equivalent of 1 attack every 3 seconds!

We clearly struck a nerve with the British public and exposed the real threat to small businesses in the UK.

The campaign delivered the most successful business period for Hiscox Cyber Insurance ever! Between 1st February-1st March 2018 Hiscox received:

· 23% YoY increase in page visits to the Hiscox website

· 54% YoY increase in new insurance quotes issued

· New business Gross Written Premiums of over £114,000 representing a 22% YoY increase in new customer revenue!

We re-ignited the cyber-security conversation, placing Hiscox firmly as the authority.