What the Cyberattack on Maersk Means for your Logistics Business
Imagine coming into the office one morning to find your data frozen, unable to access reports or conduct business. Has your data been lost? Did this affect your clients and vendors? You call around (no email either!) and hear the three words you’d been dreading: You’ve been hacked.
Now imagine this scenario on a vastly larger scale: On June 27, 2017 the Petya Cyberattack was unleashed against the I.T. systems of A.P. Moller-Maersk causing its reservations, tracking and port-management systems to become inoperative worldwide.
Almost daily, we hear about cyberattacks on financial institutions and governments. But even though these grab the headlines, the Petya incident demonstrates that breaches of logistics security can be every bit as dangerous -- not just to your business but also to the world economy.
The timing of this cyberattack comes at a particularly sensitive moment for logistics companies, as industry giants like Maersk, global retailers like Amazon, and a slew of startups are focusing their efforts on supply chain digitization. The irony here is that technology, not logistics processes or labor, is what brought 17% of the world’s container shipping to a near standstill.
Here’s what we know:
- Heading into one of the busiest weekends of port activity in the year, Maersk was virtually reduced to pen and paper operations while its systems were rendered useless.
- The attack was in the form of “Ransomware” which attempted to extort money from Maersk in order to get the attack and its effects reversed.
- The effects of the cyberattack continued to be felt at major ports such as New York for more than a week as truckers queued to collect containers that couldn’t be located in electronic systems.
- The shutdown of Maersk’s I.T. systems was entirely preventable.
That’s right, the vulnerability that the Petya Cyberattack targeted was in the Server Message Block that enabled file-sharing and print-sharing across various nodes on a network (imagine the number of times a container number and seal number has to be shared and printed just inside the Maersk ecosystem and you get why this is a soft target). Microsoft released software patches for this vulnerability in April 2017. Installing them could have at least kept Maersk’s systems running at a minimally acceptable level during the cyberattack.
So what does this mean for your logistics business?
For freight forwarders and NVOCC’s of all sizes, but especially those who lack significant I.T. budgets, it’s time to get your entire business into the cloud. This applies not only to communications like VOIP phones, email and company websites, but also to your logistics operations software as well as quoting and booking functionality. Cloud-based solutions that run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud provide the security and flexibility needed to protect and grow your business as its technology needs evolve.
It may not be easy to turn your back on servers and equipment that have been paid off and work just fine, until one fine day you find that a cyber intrusion has brought your business to a complete standstill. Shifting to a secure, cloud-based system may sound risky, but waiting for the inevitable next big hack is even riskier.
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By: CoLoadX on July 13, 2017, 10:08 a.m.