The line between online piracy and the traditional seaborne variety may be blurring.
A new report by Verizon says pirates are believed to be hacking shipping companies' computer networks in order to target specific cargoes and vessels with pirate boardings.
The US telecom’s RISK Team cybersecurity division found that a global ship operator, which commissioned the investigation after a string of recent attacks, was the target of hackers who found an insecure doorway into the company’s homegrown content management system (CMS). They exploited it to download bills of lading to target cargoes for pirate boardings.
CMS vulnerabilities
CMS systems are a common target of hackers, though it is not as common in a shipping context.
Verizon did not identify the company or say where its vessels were boarded.
The RISK team was hired by the shipping company after it became concerned that some pirates appeared to have changed their tactics in recent months.
“Rather than spending days holding boats and their crew hostage while they rummaged through the cargo, these pirates began to attack shipping vessels in an extremely targeted and timely fashion,” Verizon's Data Breach Digest said.
Beeline for the cargo
The pirates were boarding ships, forcing crews in to a corner of the vessels and then heading straight to specific containers, leading the unidentified shipping company to suspect that they had knowledge of the boxes’ contents beforehand.
“They’d board a vessel, locate by bar code specific sought-after crates containing valuables, steal the contents of that crate - and that crate only - and then depart the vessel without further incident,” the report said. “Fast, clean and easy.”
The unnamed shipping company shut down the compromised servers and took steps to adjust its security policies.
