In the recent times, Hackers and threat actors have understood the importance of the freight forwarding industry and have discovered vulnerabilities and cybersecurity issues in the shipping industries that are easy to hack, making them easy targets with high monetary benefits to plunder.
One of the vital reasons that the shipping industry is having a crosshair on their back is because they do not take the necessary precautions, most of them do not even have the instruments or the technology that prevents and protects them from a security incident or an impending cyber-attack. They are at times over-reliant on technologies from a bygone era which is ridden with vulnerabilities that are easy to hack since hackers these days have superior sophisticated technologies at their disposal.
The shipping industry needs to invest in cybersecurity that would mount a sturdy defense and they need to have stringent security standards to protect them from hackers.
Security standards are a highly essential aspect of any organization which assists in protecting the interests of the organizations. For the shipping and the freight forwarding sector they need to establish a standard for understanding and awareness of critical elements of cybersecurity and cyber safety.
The consequences for not following standards could be severe in nature, which could lead to disastrous issues like loss of vessels, damage to the ships, injuries to the crew or worst, complete loss of cargo.
Below are the standards to ensure the safety of ships by not infringing on their cybersecurity.
Awareness of safety, security, and commercial risk
Everyone aboard and related to the operational tasks for the vessels needs to be aware of the risk. Management should have safety measures in place to mitigate risks and should have an incident response plan in case of a security breach. The crew and the senior sailing officials should be on the same page when it comes to the knowledge and awareness of the security measures.
Protecting the ship with an IT infrastructure
In this era, technology should be used as a force shield to protect the shipping and freight industry from a potential attack. A combination of both hardware and software firewalls could help protect the ship from virtual intruders and guard against any vulnerabilities that allow the ship to be tracked and attacked through its GPS system.
Authentication and Authorization System
Once the access control is in place, everyone should go under an authentication and authorization process before being allowed to access private or restricted areas on the ship. Management of the users is crucial since it is critical to share information with only those who are part of a certain department. Sharing information with every department could be perilous.
Recovery plan
In the event of a security breach, there should be a contingency plan by which data restoration should take place for everything to be functional again on the ships and normalcy could commence post-cyber-attack.
Since maritime is facing various attacks owing to vulnerabilities in its outdated systems and standard procedures. The shipping industries and nations indulging in maritime trade are losing a lot of money due to this. The need for the adoption of updated technology along with a vulnerability hunting tool like Nemasis is evident.
To read more, please check eScan Blog
