At the Smart Operations conference held in Singapore last week, a representative from Dualog stated that “A cyber threat does not require a hacker”.
Thomas Heide who is Dualog’s sales manager for the Asia region made the statement whilst presenting to Smart operations delegates.
Heide told delegates that any incident that renders data or systems unavailable should be seem as a cyber security issue.
The biggest threat, Heide said, is that any shipping operation has is from their own people. In terms of ship and shore communication the biggest threat comes particularly from the crew. This is because crew often have low awareness of the risks of data use.
Therefore in order to contain and manage the internal threats effectively, it is vital for shipping operations to have the ability to differentiate types of communication usage and manage each as a separate entity, said Heide.
He also explained that there are very easily identifiable types of ship connectivity usage. There are the business critical applications and communications which are more often than not use a company machine with identified logins. Also, there are the more ‘uncontrolled’ crew communications and internet usage. Additionally there are automated machine-to-machine data exchanges- sensor data, software updates and more.
A shipping operation should be able to monitor these and importantly shut and open these different channels according to the needs of the business, stated Heide.
In closing, the Dualog representative stated: “Hackers might get the most headlines but if you do not control the infra-structure and network access properly, they are not your biggest threat.”
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