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Author: Bob Evans

Effective ToolBox Talks and your Business

Insight by

Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Published on

11 October 2023

Health and safety blog

Table of contents

Effective Tool Box Talks and your Business

Tool box talks are short presentations covering specific health and safety topics. They help to break down often complicated concepts so that they can be easily understood.

While there are many aspects related to health and safety and many legal terms associated with it, you can help to cover your legal and moral obligations by using tool box talks.

There are several reasons why a tool box talk can be help your business:

Save time & resources

By using a tool box talk you can save yourself many hours of researching the material, time which could be used to concentrate on running your business. The expectations from local authorities and the government for health and safety is often too great a burden to accomplish without help. Tool box talks give you all the documents you need to hand ready for when you need them.

Legislation

Knowing health and safety law and having it readily available in your tool box talks is an added benefit to not only you, but your employees as well. If everyone knows the law they are more likely to adhere to it.

Tool box talks risk management

Avoiding undue risk is the best form of preventing accidents occurring in the first place. By educating employees on the nature of accident control you minimise the chance of anything

The impression you leave on an individual or organisation can be long lasting and profound and therefore you want them to feel safe and at ease whenever they come into contact with your company.

Cover your legal and moral obligations and protect yourself and others in the business with toolbox talks.

Toolbox Talks are a great way to convey often complicated messages in a brief and easy to understand format.

Download 70 free toolbox talks today

Effective Tool Box Talks

TT1 – Abrasive Wheels
This talk will cover hazards and using portable and bench-mounted abrasive wheels.

TT2 – Accident Prevention & Control
Covers the cause, costs, and prevention of accidents.

TT3 – Accident Reporting & Investigation
Health and safety law requires that the following types of accidents be reported to the HSE:

  • Fatalities and major accidents
  • Injuries resulting in more than 7 days off work or inability to carry on with normal work
  • Dangerous occurrences

TT4 – Alcohol and Drugs
This talk will cover the effects of alcohol and drugs on your safety and others.

TT5 – Asbestos
This talk will cover where you will find asbestos, how it can affect you and hazardous work.

TT6 – Benefits of Safety
This talk will cover how everyone benefits from working on a safe site and the costs of not doing so.

TT7 – Buried Services
This talk will cover gas, water mains, sewers and colour coding for buried services.

TT8 – Cartridge-Operated Tools
This talk will cover before use, safe use, hazards and after use of tools.

TT9 – Chainsaws
This talk will cover preparation for use, refuelling and safe use of chainsaws.

TT10 – Control of Dust & Fumes
This talk will cover some sources and dangers of dust and fumes, as well as examples of precautions that can be taken.

TT11 – Control of Noise
This talk will cover hazards, controlling noise and ear protection.

TT11 – COSHH
This talk will cover risk assessment, hazards, control measures and safe use of substances.                                                                                                        

TT13 – Electricity on Site
This talk will cover underground cables and overhead power lines.

TT14 – Excavations
This talk will cover precautions and accidents.                                                                                       

TT15 – Fire Prevention & Control
This talk will cover fire prevention, precautions, types of extinguishers and actions on fire.

TT16 – First Aid
This talk will cover the following: before first aid, when first aid is required, and basic first aid.

TT17 – General Safety Legislation
This talk will cover details of legislation introduced to protect your health and safety whilst at work.

TT18 – General Site Health & Safety
This talk will cover responsibilities under health and safety legislation and on-site safety.

TT19 – Health & Safety at Work Act 1974
This talk will cover legal responsibilities and penalties under the Act.

TT20 – Health on Site
This talk will cover types of health issues affecting construction workers and the preventative measures.

TT21 – HFLs & Petroleum Based Adhesives
This talk will cover the hazards, storage and use of these products.

TT22 – Hoists and Hoist Towers
This talk will cover safe working practices when using hoists.

TT23 – Hydro Demolition
This talk will cover the dangers associated with hydro demolition and how they can be overcome.

TT24 – Ladders
This talk will cover before-use checks, use of ladders and hazards.

TT25 – Lead Hazards
This talk will cover the effects of lead on the body, the methods of controlling exposure and sources of exposure.

TT26 – Legal Duties of Employees
This talk will cover the legal duties of employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and regulations.

TT27 – Lifting Accessories
This talk will cover slings, chains, shackles, hooks and eyebolts.

TT28 – Lifting Equipment & Operations
This talk will cover the procedures to follow to ensure that lifting operations are carried out in a safe manner.

TT29 – LPG & Other Compressed Gases
This talk will cover hazards, use, storage and transport.

TT30 – Manual Handling
This talk will cover considerations and good techniques for manual handling.

TT31 – Mobile Elevating Work Platforms
This talk will cover the hazards and safe operating methods for MEWPs.

TT32 – Mobile Plant
This talk will cover the dangers associated with mobile plant and how they can be overcome.

TT33 – Mobile Scaffold Towers
This talk will cover erection, use, stability and hazards.

TT34 – Needle-stick Injuries
This talk will cover the actions you should take if you discover a needle and if you prick your skin with it.

TT35 – Personal Hygiene
This talk will cover the price that you may have to pay for poor standards of personal hygiene and what you can do to prevent it.

TT36 – Personal Protective Equipment
This talk will cover the measures necessary to ensure that the use of PPE is effective.

TT37 – Piling
This talk will cover The dangers and precautions to be taken.

TT38 – Plant & Equipment
This talk will cover safe operating procedures for plants and equipment; please note that lifting equipment, woodworking machines, MEWP and electrical hand tools are covered in other toolbox talks

TT39 – Pollution Control
This talk will cover sources of pollution and ways in which operatives can ensure that they don’t contribute to the pollution of the environment.

TT40 – Portable, Hand-held Tools
This talk will cover before-use checks, the use of electric tools and hazards.

TT41 – Powers of the HSE
This talk will cover what you should be aware of and what to do if an inspector visits your place of work.

TT42 – Protection of Eyes
This talk will cover hazards and wearing eye protection.

TT43 – Protection of Skin
This talk will cover hazards to the skin and precautions to protect the skin.

TT44 – Risk Assessment & Method Statements
This talk will cover what risk assessments and method statements mean to you.

TT45 – Road & Street Safety
This talk will cover the precautions necessary to protect operatives and road users.

TT46 – Safe Stacking of Materials
This talk will cover general points and stacking of bricks, timber, pipes and prefabricated panels.

TT47 – Safe Working at Height
The talk covers the hazards of working on roofs and safety when working at height.

TT48 – Safety in Demolition
This talk will cover before and during the demolition, as well as hazards on the demolition site

TT49 – Safety Inspections & Consultation
This talk will cover the benefits of safety inspections and consultation.

TT50 – Safety Nets & Suspension Equipment
This talk will cover items to be considered before, during and after using safety nets and suspension equipment.

TT51 – Safety with Steelwork
This talk will cover the hazards associated with the erection of steelwork and the precautions to be taken.

TT52 – Security on Site
This talk will cover the hazards to unauthorised visitors and ways of preventing unauthorised access.   

TT53 – Signallers and Slingers
This talk will cover lifting gear, before lifting, during lifting and potential hazards

TT54 – Site Transport
This talk will cover the dangers associated with site transport and how they can be overcome.

TT55 – Slips, Trips and Falls
This talk will cover the causes and prevention of slips, trips and falls.

TT56 – Sun Safety
This talk will cover the facts and statistics about skin cancer, who is at risk and how to protect yourself.

TT57 – System Scaffolds
This talk covers safety features, which are specific system scaffolds. In addition to other safety features that are common to all scaffolds,

TT58 – Trackside Safety
This talk will cover some hazards and precautions associated with working on railways.

TT59 – Trestles and Stepladders
This talk will cover folding adjustable trestles and stepladders.

TT60 – Tube & Fittings Scaffolding
This talk will cover access, loading, hazards, inspection and security.

TT61 – Vehicle Fuels
This talk will cover the hazards created by different fuels and the precautions necessary.

TT62 – Vibration
This talk will cover the sources, effects and methods of overcoming excessive vibration.

TT63 – Waste Management
This talk will cover the risks to health and safety resulting from poor housekeeping.

TT64 – Water Jetting
This talk will cover the dangers associated with water jetting and how they can be overcome.

TT65 – Weil’s Disease
This talk will cover the effects and symptoms of Weil’s disease, the measures you should take to avoid it, and who may be at risk.

TT66 – Welfare Arrangements
This talk will cover the factors determining whether site welfare facilities are adequate.

TT67 – Woodworking Machines
This talk will cover the safety precautions in the use of hand-held circular saws and floor-mounted woodworking machines.

TT68 – Working in Confined Spaces
This talk will cover hazards, such as before entry, work in confined spaces, and emergency procedures.

TT69 – Working over Water
This talk will cover the prevention of drowning and rescue from the water.

TT70 – Young People on Site
This talk will cover why young people are vulnerable and what we should all be doing to safeguard their health and safety on site.

Download 70 free toolbox talks today

The Importance Of Safe Manual Handling In Your Business

Insight by

Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Published on

29 June 2022

Health and safety blog

The Importance of Safe Manual Handling In Your Business

Learn the essentials of safe manual handling to reduce injury risks associated with lifting and moving heavy loads effectively. All manual work involves lifting and handling to some extent. Although mechanical equipment should be used whenever practicable, much of the work will inevitably continue to be done manually. The risk of injury can be greatly reduced by a knowledge and application of correct lifting and handling techniques and by taking a few elementary precautions.

Manual handling relates to transporting or supporting of a load (including lifting, putting down, pushing, pulling, carrying or moving thereof) by hand or by bodily force” It is the most common recognised reason for injury at work.

In any case, it’s not simply ‘pulling something’ because of the heaviness of an item, injuries can be brought on in different causes, for example:

  • Reaching and lifting over your head
  • Long carrying distances
  • Twisting
  • Bending
  • Any poor stance positions
  • Lifting or carrying objects with awkward or odd shapes

Over 20% of all accidents occurring in the UK Construction Industry each year involve injuries sustained whilst manually lifting and handling materials or equipment. This incorporates Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs), e.g. injuries or pain in the body’s joints, ligaments, muscles, nerves, tendons, and structures that support limbs, neck and back. Manual handling injuries can happen anyplace inside of the working environment; However, manual labour, existing injuries and unbalanced stance positions can increase the risks.

Manual handling can have consequential implications for the employer and for the individual who has been injured. The employer may bring about some significant expenses, for example, sickness payment, lost production, retraining of a brief labourer, over time to cover the absence and, possibly, compensation. The injured individual may find that their capacity to carry out their occupation has been influenced and their way of life may need to change.

In this manner, it is basic that you must consider the risks and where there are risks, regulations apply.

The Regulations establish a clear hierarchy of measures:

  • AVOID handling operations involving risk of injury
  • ASSESS operations involving risk of injury that cannot be avoided
  • REDUCE the risk of injury e.g. using handling aids and provide information on the load
  • REVIEW the assessment

Employers Duties

  • Carry out a Manual Handling Assessment
  • Reduce risk of injury
  • Replace Manual tasks where possible
  • Introduce mechanical aids

Employees likewise have responsibilities:

  • Make proper use of equipment & follow safe working systems
  • Co-operate with their employer
  • Ensure others are not put at risk
  • Avoid tasks likely to cause injury
  • Co-operate with the employer to reduce the risk of injury to themselves and others

Safe manual handling training

Review our safe manual handling online training course.

Safe manual handling RAMS

Buy our manual handling risk assessments and method statement

There are numerous routes in which manual handling can be maintained, see the HSE’s brief guide on manual handling.

5 Top Tips for Preventing Falls from Height

Insight by

Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Published on

20 June 2022

Health and safety blog

Falls from Height

Learn the strategies preventing falls from height. Falls from height continues to be the largest causes of major injuries and fatalities.  About 4000 working at height-related accidents occur each year at work and the most common cases are falls from ladders and through fragile services. Alarmingly, two thirds of all major injuries at work are caused by ‘low falls’ A low fall is a fall from a height below 2 metres.  A high fall is a fall from a height of more than 2 metres.

Top Tips for Preventing Falls from Height:

  1. As with all work activities, a suitable and sufficient risk assessment is key to preventing falls from height. The planned activity and location should also be assessed immediately before work takes place, in case there have been any changes since the original assessment took place. The above case is a good example, in terms of missing panels that had not been put back following previous works.
  2. All parties involved should be made aware of the findings of the risk assessment, so there needs to be procedures in place to ensure good communication of the hazards, control measures and any changes to the planned works.
  3. In terms of control measures, eliminating the need to work at height is usually the best option. However, in reality, that isn’t always possible. Use suitable work equipment such as a working platform, or an existing safe area with a permanent guardrail, and make sure workers can reach it safely.
  4. All works should be supervised, and the job undertaken by competent staff. Assessing someone’s competency would include looking at their experience, knowledge and skillset, as well as their qualifications.
  5. Consider both personal and collective measures to minimise the distance and consequences of a fall, where some risk does remain, such as fall arrest equipment or safety nets.

Most falls from height can be prevented, by ensuring proper planning of the work and by selecting the right equipment for the job. When equipment is not suitable, it can lead to workers finding other ways to complete the job, which can have fatal consequences.

Working at heights training course

If you are still unsure and would like to look at refreshing your knowledge we offer an working at height e-learning course for you to sit whenever is convenient for you.

You can download HSE’s Working at Height Brief Guide Here

5 Key Points for Managing Asbestos

Insight by

Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Published on

28 September 2015

Asbestos

Table of contents

Mesothelioma -Do You Know Enough About this Deadly Disease?

Managing Asbestos is a legal duty. Asbestos contains tiny fibres which are too small for the eye to see, yet they can do great damage to the lungs if breathed in. Mesothelioma is a cancer of the lining of the lung and is just one of the diseases associated with the material. The latency period for symptoms of the disease can be long – often 10 or more years – and there is currently no cure.

5 Key Points for Managing Asbestos

  1. Asbestos could be present in any building either built or refurbished before the year 2000. Check building and renovation plans if you are unsure, as well as any asbestos surveys undertaken. Ceiling and floor tiles, older boilers, lagging and asbestos cement are often key areas to look at.
  2. The material only poses a significant risk to health if it is accessible and in a poor or damaged condition. It is therefore important that you know what type of asbestos you have and the condition it is in.
  3. Those most at risk are people who work on the fabric of the building – carpenters, plumbers, electricians and builders, for example, as well as any maintenance staff on site. There is therefore a duty to tell those who may be on your premises about any asbestos in the building before they undertake work. You should do this before they carry out a risk assessment/method statement so that all risks and control measures are factored in.
  4. Some work with asbestos – either removing it or working with it – may require a licensed asbestos contractor. Check that any contractors you use have the correct licence to do the work.
  5. Making others aware of the existence of asbestos is vital. As a visual prompt, label your asbestos with industry-recognised stickers so that it is clear that asbestos is in the vicinity should anyone be undertaking work in the area.

Asbestos is a killer and any amount of exposure can be dangerous – preventing exposure is therefore the key to limiting the number who develop asbestos-related diseases. Protect your staff, contractors and visitors so they never have to suffer.

The Differences Between Mesothelioma and Asbestosis

Both mesothelioma and asbestosis occur most often in people who were exposed to asbestos on the job. Second-hand asbestos exposure can also result in a diagnosis of either disease.

Asbestosis only affects the lungs and respiratory tract and cannot spread or develop elsewhere like mesothelioma cancer. The disease does not typically affect life expectancy. However, an asbestosis diagnosis can increase the risk of developing mesothelioma or another disease.

Although both caused by asbestos, mesothelioma and asbestosis develop differently from one another. Mesothelioma develops after asbestos fibers become lodged in the mesothelium lining of the chest, abdomen, or thoracic cavity rather than in various body cavities, asbestosis only develops in the air sacs of the lungs.

Managing asbestos online training

Our asbestos awareness online training is designed for your employees to be able to complete it when it is most convenient for them at work or home. The training is multiple choice and lasts for approx. 1 hour.

Why our Asbestos Online Training is different

  • Our course is priced for all businesses at £25 + vat per delegate
  • Mobile friendly
  • We have an online platform that businesses can create an account and allocate employees training purchased
  • Managers are able to see each employees progress
  • We allow up to two resets before the course is considered as a fail
  • Try our asbestos training for FREE 

Managing Asbestos RAMS

A comprehensive risk assessment and method statement template for removal asbestos floor tiles risk assessment, developed by qualified health and safety professionals.

Our removal asbestos floor tiles risk assessment risk assessment and method statement document proactively identify, evaluate, and mitigate potential risks.

The document covers all the appropriate Control Procedures and Hazards for a typical job but can be easily edited to your needs. This is a ready-to-use document that can be implemented in your business straight away.

You can add your brand and adjust the content to fit your site constraints.

Includes:

  • 12 pages of content
  • 3,251 words

Additional Information:

  • The document covers all the appropriate Hazards and Control Procedures for a typical job
  • In “MS Word” format
  • Fully editable – include your company logo and details
  • The template should be changed to suit the specific job you are performing

Buy our asbestos risk assessment and method statements

Growth of networked electronic controls is a safety issue

Insight by

Bob Evans

Bob Evans

Published on

5 July 2015

Health and safety blog

Internet Security

Growth of networked electronic controls is a safety issue.

No self regarding health and safety professional would disregard hazard evaluations and systems for Asbestos, work at height or manual handling; yet I’ll wager that the only risk assessment you have for IT is a display screen assessment. In any case, on the off chance that you have equipment in your business that connects with the web and to something important — from a central heating thermostat to a blast furnace — electronic health and safety ought to be on your radar.

Numerous organizations have an IT office and a health and safety division, whose sole contact is the point at which somebody needs another laptop or fails to remember their password. Some have an unclear dependence on Google or the gentleman in PC World for support. As of not long ago that didn’t do much for your possibilities of recuperating an erased email, however it wasn’t going to kill anybody.

When we discuss the web, a great many people think about the human-driven traffic it conveys: email messages, website pages, instant messaging and videos. In truth most activity is not between people, it’s between computers: automated, quiet packets of data containing database questions, records, sensor information and control signals.

At the beginning of ARPAnet, the web’s forerunner, this movement was under the control of the US military. The outcomes of somebody playing about in there were possibly spectacular. In spite of the fact that the thought that you could sign in and launch a nuclear missile was never true, it was worthy of a few film scripts.

Then the worldwide web arrived and the entire system became a means of pouring cat videos and niche adult entertainment into every home. But the undercurrent of the internet carried on regardless.

Next year the internet will carry a zettabyte (one trillion gigabytes) of data. By 2019, two-thirds of all traffic will be from non-PC devices, and there will be three devices connected to the internet for every person on the planet.

Wired world

Networked control systems are nothing new, but in the 1990s, when they consisted of ISDN lines to the company mainframe, they were point to point and secure, though slow and expensive.

Then the internet arrived, and everything changed. People wanting access to their emails and the web installed modems and broadband routers, and all those machines suddenly had access to, in effect, a cost free means of talking to one another; instead of renting a dedicated phone line, just plug it into the net.

Manufacturers stopped putting serial ports on their devices, and started adding ethernet sockets. Later, even those disappeared, replaced by wifi antennas. Volume sales drove research and development and, as the technology became smaller and cheaper it spread from hulking great computers and rack mounted servers into individual switches and sensors.

For the price of a decent lunch you can put a camera the size of a golf ball in your house. It will automatically register with your wifi router, stream the images through a server in China, and you can sit in the restaurant and on your iPhone watch your cat shred your curtains, live and in high definition. Most of the people who buy them have no idea about that Chinese detour by the data. If you missed it too, it’s time to put down your sandwich and say hello to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Chips in everything

The IoT includes every one of the devices that operate the internet to communicate with each other. They can be transmitting information for remote examination by PCs or people (as cameras, indoor regulators, wellness trackers), they can be receiving commands (valves, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), electronic locks) and they could be doing both, as on account of mobiles, smart TVs and remote hard drives. Frequently the end purposes of that information are inside of meters of one another, yet the traffic jumps around the world to get there.

Presently, the internet conveys the control signals for all things from petrol pumps to nuclear power stations. A large portion of the devices are a piece of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) frameworks,a generic term for any network of sensors, controllers and actuators that can be operating numerous different types of hardware and software.

SCADA devices are designed to be simple and reliable inside a factory, but tend to be woefully ill-prepared for connection to the internet, thanks to lax security and poorly written software. It’s often trivially simple to reprogramme a petrol pump to say something rude — it happened in the US in February — or infect the control systems of a nuclear power station — achieved in South Korea in December. All you need is to find the plant on the net and ask nicely.

Spun out

The first contact with this type of cyber attack was Stuxnet (see graphic below), a PC virus identified in 2010 that was said to be created to destroy uranium enrichment centrifuges —and it was somewhat great at it.. The code searched networks for PLCs running a specific piece of software from Siemens, and changed it;in the case of the centrifuges, to spin them into oblivion.

The problem is that, as with any virus — electronic or biological — it was rather good at destroying other things too. The original code was targeted and time limited, but it opened the eyes of hackers, from state sponsored teams to bored kids, to the opportunities for mayhem if you could seek out and take over a logic controller.

Stuxnet was dissected and improved, and its code is still used today to attack networks around the world. The reason it’s so effective is that the manufacturers of these internet connected SCADA devices almost always used trivially simple default passwords or “back door” access codes for factory testing. Many systems run firmware that is impossible to upgrade without a soldering iron, so when a hacker finds the way in they can run riot for years, and are often very hard to detect. If a device has no display screen, how do you know what it’s really doing?

You’d imagine that device designers had taken in their lesson at this point, yet a long way from it. Near enough everything that you connect to the internet, from a broadband router to a baby monitor,will have at least one security gap that hackers about. Since every one of these devices are joined with one another, and the security in local networks is dependably at the edges, it’s exceptionally easy to break in through a weakly protected device then bounce around searching for something else.

If I know you run a manufacturing plant, then first I find the unique IP address of your broadband router, which will be in the header information of every email you send, and every web page you visit. I can try to connect to the router, using the default manufacturer password.

Most of the time I’ll get in; but if access is only possible from inside your local network, I can send you a virus by email or through a malicious piece of code on a website. I could send you a free brochure on DVD or USB drive, with a virus payload attached, and your computer can open the doors for me.

Once inside, my virus sees every device on the network, and all the data flowing between them. It can see which devices are laptops, sensors, cameras and PLCs. It can try sending a few commands for fun — open a valve or two or change a temperature limit. It can reprogramme them so the emergency stop buttons become emergency start buttons.

The German Federal Office for Information Security reported last December that an anonymous steel factory had endured “massive harm to plant” following a cyber-attack demolished parts of the control framework, leaving the engineers unable to close down a blast furnace.

How Stuxnet works

Auto configured

Hackers are exploiting two simple facts: the average user of an IoT device is not a programmer, and it’s cheaper to write a program than to design a chip.

Devices have to be extremely simple to set up, often doing lots of automatic configuration without telling the user what’s happening, and 90% of the time users don’t even know how to change the default password or PIN.

We’re all familiar with automatic updates for Windows and mobile apps, yet updating the operating system on IoT devices can be difficult and is hardly done. This is despite the fact that, instead of custom made chips that can only do one thing, nearly almost every IoT device uses a tiny embedded computer, with an operating system and software.

Your broadband router uses Linux, and many PLC controllers use Windows. Both are capable of running other programs — including a tweaked version of the factory installed application that appears to be doing everything normally — until someone on the other side of the planet clicks a button and unleashes a SCADA worm to disable all your interlock switches.

Thanks to the ubiquity of Bluetooth and wifi, you don’t even need to plug in anything. Your attacker can be walking past with a mobile phone or sitting in a basement on the other side of the world.

As we’ve seen in the news many times, the value of things like credit card numbers and identity theft bundles drove hackers to seek out customer databases in big corporations, but the cost/benefit ratio for IoT hacks is potentially far greater and is receiving more attention.

Hackers get long term access because the devices are hard to patch, don’t run anti-virus software, and users are oblivious to what you’re doing.

The rewards are huge; stealing an out of date customer list is nothing compared with blackmailing someone with a fleet of wind turbines that you can disable at will from anywhere in the world. That’s exploit CVE-2015-0985, in which turbines made by XZERES would obligingly send anyone the admin password for their control systems if they connected on the default web page. It made life easy for the engineers; easier still for the hackers. There were lessons learned on both sides.

Under your nose

Apart from causing physical damage and putting lives in danger, hackers can re-purpose the embedded software to work on their behalves; some of the biggest cyber attacks in recent months were carried out using botnets; hundreds of thousands of compromised systems in homes and offices working together under the control of hackers. These weren’t computers; they were broadband modems and PLCs. Millions of little boxes with flashing lights that are always connected, always vulnerable, and never checked. What’s yours doing now?

You may not be in charge of a nuclear reactor, but an outdated PLC or embedded Windows XP system controlling a printer in some far flung site is the perfect place to hide the command and control software that attacks something else. Stuxnet infected computers in Iran mainly, but many businesses in other countries suffered because they happened to have the same model of PLC.

You’ll need the IT department to work in partnership. Auditing firmware isn’t yet part of the NEBOSH exam; but making sure nothing on the network has a default password is simple enough, and educating your staff about the real-world hazards of a cyber-attack should be as important as toolbox talks on manual handling because in many cases they are the chinks in your armour. The German blast furnace was taken out by a free gift USB drive sent to a random employee. Stuxnet was an email attachment.

The IoT isn’t just for industry. People are inseparable from their smartphones, smart watches, portable hard drives and memory sticks, all of which can be re-purposed to inject viruses and scan your internal networks, sniffing for passwords and reporting back to their unseen masters.

Your IT department should be all too aware of the need to scan emails and change wifi passwords regularly, but if the security camera in your car park is accessible from anywhere and answers to “Password123”, you’re one hop away from chaos.

In a few years time the IoT will invade every aspect of our lives, from internet-enabled swimsuits to wireless cat-feeding stations. Some of it will control your production line, filter your drinking water and keep your doors locked. It will be marketed as efficient and easy to use. It will be promoted at individuals who think SCADA is a brand of car. It will be hacked. It will be watching you. You ought to be watching it as well.