In a recent article a researcher proclaimed it’s “not hard for a hacker to capsize a ship at sea“. This was quickly followed by the Viking Sky cruise ship having its engines shut off due to a sensor reading.
Not knowing much about maritime control systems I brought two experts from Moran Cyber on the podcast to discuss the issue: Captain Alex Soukhanov (a Master Mariner and Director at Moran Cyber) and Greg Villano (Senior Maritime Cybersecurity Engineeer at Moran Cyber). Both Alex and Greg have spent their careers on ships and now are working to secure the control systems that are becoming more essential every year.
Not knowing much about this sector, you hear the line of questioning that is used to begin to understand risk. It actually focuses more on impact and recovery than a list of specific security controls. It appears the maritime industry will face increasing challenges as they move away from ships that can continue to operate with manual operations.
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This episode was sponsored by CyberX. Founded by military cyber experts with nation-state expertise defending critical infrastructure, CyberX has developed an end-to-end platform for continuous ICS threat monitoring and risk mitigation.
Check out the 2019 CyberX Global ICS and IIoT Risk Report, the CyberX report on the NIS Directive, and my podcast from last year on the report with Phil Neray.