Cybersecurity Challenges in the Maritime Sector

Abstract

Cyberattacks have been rapidly increasing over the years, resulting to big financial losses to businesses for recovery, regulatory sanctions, as well as collateral damages, such as reputation and trust. In this respect, the maritime sector, which until now was considered safe due to the lack of Internet connectivity and the isolated nature of ships in the sea, is showing a 900% increase in cybersecurity breaches on operational technology as it enters the digital era. Although some research is being conducted in this area, maritime cybersecurity has not been deeply investigated. Hence, this paper provides a close investigation of the landscape of cybersecurity in the maritime sector with the aim of highlighting security problems and challenges. First, it explores the systems available on ships that could be targeted by attackers, their possible vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit, the consequences if the system is accessed, and actual incidents. Then, it describes and analyses possible mitigation actions that can be utilised in advance to prevent such attacks. Finally, several challenges and open problems are discussed for future research.

Charting a Course in Troubled Waters: Towards a New Cold War in Global Commons

“… Cybersecurity and Information Warfare: The increasing reliance on networked systems and the interconnected nature of naval operations create vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit. Cybersecurity measures and the ability to conduct information warfare are becoming critical for maintaining operational integrity and safeguarding sensitive information (Akpan et al, 2022). Hypersonic Weapons: Hypersonic weapons, capable of travelling at speeds greater than Mach 5, pose challenges to traditional defence systems due to their high velocity and manoeuvrability.…”

“…Cybersecurity and Information Warfare: The increasing reliance on networked systems and the interconnected nature of naval operations create vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit. Cybersecurity measures and the ability to conduct information warfare are becoming critical for maintaining operational integrity and safeguarding sensitive information (Akpan et al, 2022). 4.…”

Actual and future digital threats and their impact on civil and military cybersecurity management

“…The maritime sector, which until now was considered safe due to the lack of Internet connectivity and the isolated nature of ships in the sea, is showing a 900% increase in cybersecurity breaches on operational technology as it enters the digital era (Akpan et al, 2022).…”

Literature review on maritime cybersecurity: state-of-the-art

“…Scholars, industry experts, and government and municipal authorities have jointly advocated for more solid cybersecurity checks and balances in every part of the maritime system, navigator competency enhancement (Hareide et al, 2018;Akpan et al, 2022) to recognise and deal with cyber-attacks appropriately, and a build-up of synthetic reliable systems, including raising awareness of cybersecurity, improving the competence of involvers, maintaining robustness risk estimation framework, deploying confrontational methodologies and models, and designing flexible counterpart plans (Amro and Gkioulos, 2022). It is essential to develop the incentive to actively collect cyber-attacks evidence with scrutiny of every part of the maritime shipping industry under every minor or significant threat.…”