Researchers say they have discovered significant holes in the three key technologies sailors use to navigate: GPS, marine Automatic Identification System (AIS) as seen above, and a system for viewing digital nautical charts called Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS).
The next hacker playground: the open seas – and the oil tankers and container vessels that ship 90 percent of the goods moved around the planet.
In this internet age, as more devices are hooked up online, so they become more vulnerable to attack. As industries like maritime and
energy connect ships, containers and rigs to computer networks, they expose weaknesses that hackers can exploit.
Hackers recently shut down a floating oil rig by tilting it, while another rig was so riddled with computer malware that it took 19 days to make it seaworthy again; Somali pirates help choose their targets by viewing navigational data online, prompting ships to either turn off their navigational devices, or fake the data so it looks like they’re somewhere else; and hackers infiltrated computers connected to the Belgian port of Antwerp, located specific containers, made off with their smuggled drugs and deleted the records.
A study last year by the Brookings Institution of six U.S. ports found that only one had conducted an assessment of how vulnerable it was to a cyber attack, and none had developed any plan to response to any such attack. Of some $2.6 billion allocated to a federal program to beef up port security, less than 1 percent had been awarded for cyber security projects.