Blog alert on the ease of cyber attacks on ships was pure scaremongering

06/12/2017

Last month a much-reported blog – included in The Loadstar – claimed “sinking ships [via hacking], really wouldn’t take much”.

Not only was that overly dramatic and not helpful for safety of life at sea, but it was irresponsible as well as being fundamentally flawed: the input assumptions were totally incorrect.

The blog jumped around without a logical flow and appeared to conclude that if you corrupted the stowage or Bayplan, via the BAPLIE message – which is given by the ...

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Miles Varghese
December 06, 2017 at 3:17 pm
Great post, Andy. Huge respect to CTI, but I feel as though this piece in itself may let down the guard of an industry that is severely exposed.

The technicalities and strategies will vary, but legacy systems are easy to hack. Bay plans included. We’ve seen and worked with the EDI systems in place with many liners and were appalled by the lack of security and actually trying to change that by explaining what the cloud and SaaS really means.

The risk is huge especially when so much is done by email. The industry is easily 10-20 years behind and if a hacker were to set his sights, it would be far easier to breach than what exists today.

Liners are liners, not technology companies despite their best efforts. They know only what they know, and we’re doing what we can at Octopi to educate and explain how modern software (i.e. the terminal operating system) should be handled.

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