MFAME attended the CIMAC world congress which just closed the curtains, at Helsinki, Finland on June 10th 2016. The event was so exciting and wonderful where the technical papers presented and new technology springing up will definitely lead the ship and engine monitoring to the next high levels. No doubt, that drones and robots would sail in the high seas where operators at shore monitor, control, and operate them.
With curtains just down on CIMAC and Posidonia, and SMM floors being set and scheduled in October 2016, we would like to bring your attention on to one important issue which the industry has yet to perfect – and yes, it is Cyber Security.
The exhibition floors have been walked by many experts, scientists, ship operators and owners and the exhibitors competed to sell their state-of-the-art products and solutions. We recommend the ship owners and operators, not only to think on product reliability and cost effectiveness, but also on the measures to prevent cyber-security.
The buzz words which you could hear around such exhibition floors are often Automation, Connectivity, and Big data. However as shipping steps into more and more virtually controlled operations, the much needed buzz word of this time is “cyber-security”.
Much has been done on Automation, Connectivity, and Big Data and every year we can see some more advancements being attempted. However, when it comes to cyber-security, we are still in the initial stages of evolving rules and guidelines.
According to a report on BBC, “Apparently there are now more than 120 separate families of ransomware and some researchers have seen a 3,500% increase in the criminal use of net infrastructure that helps run ransomware campaigns. And importantly, it seems that the criminals that make use of ransomware are finding it easy to circumvent many of the most trusted anti-virus products available”.
It is recommended to put cyber-security requirements as one other main feature and ship owners can benchmark products and services based on how cyber-secure they are along with ratings and features.
Though shipping has not witnessed any major cyber-security threat or attack as frequent as grounding or fire, we recommend our readers to read our previously published news about a CEO who lost million dollars.
Cyber attacks are a constant threat to businesses around the world with vast sums of money being spent to protect against them. The image of some nefarious character plotting from his/her bedroom is the one image most of us have to be aware of when thinking about hackers and cyber criminals.
In 2015, 40 percent of attacks stemmed from ‘outsiders’, a surprising 60 percent were actually perpetrated by company insiders.
IBM, who produced the figures based on information from over 8,000 of their clients devices, revealed that although 15.5 percent of such ‘attacks’ were caused inadvertently, 44.5 percent were deemed to have been malicious.
An insider is defined as anyone who has physical or remote access to a company’s assets. IBM notes that although this would often be an employee, it can also mean business partners or maintenance contractors – people you trust enough to grant system access to. Insiders not only have this access, they may also be aware of your weaknesses and thus exploit them more effectively than an outside agent might be able to.
This chart shows the type of people that committed cyber attacks in 2015.
Given the new trend of autonomous management, navigation on vessels, it is high time that ship owners and operators start giving more thought to Cyber Security besides fuel savings, energy efficiency, and green technology.
