Hacked at Sea: Concerns Grow Over Lax Cybersecurity for Ships, Ports
With a combined 45 years in IT security, Adsero’s principals have seen it all. There is no problem we can’t solve. By land or sea, we always have your back. Check out what happens when you are hacked at sea,
As hacking risks grow and maritime operations become more digitally connected, experts in industry and government have long said no one is prepared. This summer was a wake-up call.
THE PORT OF New York and New Jersey is the largest port on the east coast of the United States, touted by officials as the “gateway to one of the most concentrated and affluent consumer markets in the world.” But for a few weeks last summer, the goods moving through one of its terminals slowed to a crawl because of a global cyber attack that originated 4,500 miles away.
“The delays were six to eight hours to pick up a container,” said Jeffrey Bader, chief executive of the trucking company Golden Carriers, recalling when a terminal in Elizabeth, New Jersey, switched to manual operations while its systems were down. “The line was many, many miles long. Trucks, trucks, trucks.”
The terminal’s operator, APM Terminals, is a subsidiary of the world’s largest container shipping company, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group. The company, which transports roughly 20 percent of the world’s cargo containers, was among the hardest hit by the NotPetya ransomware. NotPetya sprouted in hacked accounting software in Ukraine in late June, and by exploiting a weakness in Microsoft Windows operating systems, quickly went global as it infected corporate networks and locked down the data of contaminated computers. Hackers would usually restore access after a ransom payment is made, but NotPetya was engineered to cause chaos more than extort funds, cybersecurity experts say.
Maersk and many other global firms affected, such as FedEx and pharmaceutical giant Merck, were not specific targets of the attack, but that didn’t matter. In a “heroic effort” over 10 days, Maersk reinstalled 4,000 servers, 45,000 personal computers, and 2,500 applications, chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe said at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos last month
To read more, https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/02/05/hacked-at-sea-concerns-grow-over-lax-cybersecurity-for-ships-ports
