PCMag went to San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, to get a look at the port and its Cyber Command Center.
Maritime policing is full of thrill, excitement and/or peril as compared to the other forms of law enforcement. There has been a dedicated police force at the Port of Los Angeles since 1911. Now, it numbers 130. It’s the busiest port in the US and the ninth busiest in the world.
The port opened in 1907. It has now grown to 7,500 acres with 43 miles of shoreline. The port is responsible for 1 million jobs in the region, providing $39.1 billion in annual wages and tax revenue. In 2014, 8.3 million TEUs were sent on their way via trucks and onto the transcontinental rail network, and 430,000 people embarked on a cruise ship journey across the Pacific Ocean.
Smuggling has been an issue for over 100 years, particularly heroin coming over the border in the 1970s. But more recently, crime over computer networks has become a dominant threat.
LA Port Security
Los Angeles Assistant Chief of Police Michael R. Hillmann, has a service of 40-plus years as a crime fighter. He has covered all the bases: anti-terrorism, gangland shootings, the riots, Sept. 11, SWAT team maneuvers, crisis negotiation, narcotics, and homicide. His career has been mostly metropolitan, in high-density areas. Presently, he’s completing a three-year stint at the Port of Los Angeles, where he’s ramped up response to the ever-increasing threat of cyber crime.
He said, ‘We classify our policing into three main areas. Kinetic – Criminal/Terrorism, which includes active shooter, vessel immobilization, subsurface threats, and other attacks. Disaster Emergency Management, ensuring we’re prepared to deal with earthquakes, tsunami, fires, explosions, aviation mishaps, and anything else environmental. I have rapidly scaled up the port’s ability to fight what we call Non-Kinetic – Cyber: malicious attacks such as DDoS, ransomware, and power grid disruption.’
The workforce
Apart from the officers on the beat, on foot, bicycle, speedboat, or helicopter, there is also an underwater unit, drug-sniffing canines, and the “bomb dogs” who detect explosives. These are all supported by a sophisticated tech layer of video cameras, data analytics, GPS-enabled hand receivers. Threats are assessed on a scale from Level I to III.
Centres of action
There is a Threat Detection Center where officers monitor a network of 435 cameras, both fixed and PTZ (point-tilt-zoom), covering 225 access control points into the port on a 24/7 basis. In the Department Operations Center, Chief Hillmann walked us through the SMART Boards, which receive intelligence from all over the port, rendering an at-a-glance overview of what’s going on, complete with maritime codes, cargo descriptions, and vessel egress.
The Cyber Command Center is a small, windowless room (for security reasons), but looks exactly like something out of the movies with banks of monitors and a touch screen showing a world map with the time ticking down digitally in several cities including Beijing, Berlin, Islamabad, Moscow, and Washington D.C. It is being monitored by cyber security personnel, some of whom happen to have prior military service, like Tony Zhong, acting Chief Information Security Officer.
He shared that on an average month, they have over 250 million firewall transactions and 10-15 million are unauthorized, so require action. Even with a cyber program in place, there is still the chance of an incident. Being proactive will hopefully help prepare us to respond to a cyber incident when it occurs.
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Source: PCMag
