Maritime and port cybersecurity.

On November 26, 2019, ENISA (the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity) published a report titled “Port Cybersecurity – Good practices for cybersecurity in the maritime sector”.

Like the rest of the maritime sector, ports are undergoing rapid digital transformation and increasingly evolving toward the concept of the smart port. The objective is to improve efficiency across logistics, safety, and financial performance.

Many technological trends are involved in this transformation, including IoT, blockchain (particularly for logistics), big data, cloud computing, automation, artificial intelligence, and 5G. While these technologies can improve operational capabilities, they also increase the potential exposure of port infrastructures to cyber threats.

Cyberattacks targeting the maritime sector are becoming increasingly frequent. Ships, ports, and logistics infrastructures are now part of the global digital threat landscape. In response, France has begun structuring an initiative aimed at strengthening cybersecurity across the maritime domain, with several major ports and industrial stakeholders preparing to play a role.

A widely cited example occurred in June 2017, when the shipping company Maersk suffered a major disruption following the spread of the Petya ransomware. The attack disabled thousands of servers and tens of thousands of workstations within the company’s infrastructure. The consequences extended beyond the company itself: operations at several major commercial ports were disrupted, and some facilities had to suspend activities temporarily.

According to the newspaper Jeune Afrique, two submarine telecommunications cables were cut approximately 300 km off the coast of Cameroon. These two cables, named WACS and SAT3, each serve around ten countries across West Africa, from Senegal to South Africa.

Already affected by previous outages in 2007 and 2009, these cables are not the only ones serving West Africa, but their disruption still has a significant impact on the bandwidth available to telecom operators.

The website of the U.S. Coast Guard (which is involved in cyberspace issues, as mentioned in this article) reports that a U.S. maritime operator was impacted by the “Ryuk” ransomware.

This malicious code is not new. It first appeared in the summer of 2018 and has already affected numerous companies, such as Eurofins in the summer of 2019 or Prosegur more recently. As noted by CheckPoint, the malware is not particularly sophisticated from a technical perspective, but it specifically targets large companies and organizations with significant financial resources that may prefer to pay a ransom (which is not recommended and does not always work, particularly in the case of Ryuk) rather than lose several days of operations. As early as January 2019, it had already generated €3 million for its operators (source: Le Monde). In March 2019, the French cybersecurity agency ANSSI published both an alert bulletin and a news bulletin about this malware.

Below is a report produced by the BBC in Finland aboard an autonomous vessel (a real one, not a 3D animation). It is quite interesting, as this type of technology may soon become a reality.

Around 2:30 in the video, the journalist briefly addresses cybersecurity, explaining that “if something goes wrong with the autonomous vessel, a control station [on shore] like this one will allow operators to take control of the ship from land and bring it to safety, wherever it is in the world. Rolls-Royce, which developed the technology, believes that within less than 20 years we will see fully autonomous ships crossing our oceans. But, as with any connected technology, one of the major concerns is security.”

Pursuing the latest innovations at all costs can sometimes lead to unexpected consequences. The website USNI News reports that the U.S. Navy will progressively move back from touchscreen propulsion controls in favor of traditional rotary knobs, physical controls, and switches.

Two years ago, a collision between the U.S. warship USS John S. McCain and a tanker resulted in the deaths of ten sailors in busy waters near Singapore and Malaysia.