Shipping subjected to 400% increase in attempted hacks

There has been a massive 400% increase in attempted hacks on commercial shipping since February 2020, Israeli cybersecurity specialist, Naval Dome claimed earlier this month. The hacking onslaught began as the maritime industry turned to greater use of technology and home working due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

 

Naval Dome ascribed the spike in malware, ransomware, and phishing emails to the Covid-19 crisis, adding that travel restrictions, social distancing measures, and economic recession are beginning to bite into a company’s ability to sufficiently protect itself.

 

“Covid-19 social restrictions and border closures have forced original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), technicians, and vendors to connect standalone systems to the internet in order to service them,” Naval Dome chief executive Itai Sela said.

 

OEM technicians are unable to fly out to ships and rigs to upgrade and service critical OT systems, resulting in operators circumventing established security protocols, leaving them open to attack.

 

“As budgets are cut and in the absence of service engineers, we are seeing ship and offshore rig staff connecting their OT systems to shoreside networks, at the behest of OEMs, for brief periods of time to carry out diagnostics and upload software updates and patches themselves.

 

“This means that their IT and OT systems are no longer segregated and individual endpoints, critical systems, and components may be susceptible. Some of these are legacy systems which have no security update patches and are even more susceptible to cyber attack.

 

“The increase in OEM personnel working remotely on home networks and personal PCs, which are not well protected, adds to the problem,” he added.

 

Mr Sela said that during the first three months of 2020, attacks targeting home workers increased tenfold, adding that PC security software provider McAfee has reported that between January and April cloud-based cyber-attached on all businesses increase by 630%.

 

As pointed out, the economic downturn and the drop in the price of crude oil is also having an effect, with oil companies and contractors being faced with limited budgets available to implement effective cyber security measures.

 

“Companies are stretched thin and this is benefitting the hacker,” said Mr Sela.

 

“It is not sufficient to protect only networks from attack. Each individual system must be protected. If networks are penetrated, then all connected systems will be infected,” he concluded.

 

Source:hongkongmaritimehub

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