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Security Software

All Four of the World's Largest Shipping Companies Have Been Hit By Cyberattacks (zdnet.com) 12

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: With today's news that French shipping giant CMA CGM has been hit by a ransomware attack, this now means that all of the four biggest maritime shipping companies in the world have been hit by cyber-attacks in the past four years, since 2017. Previous incidents included: 1.) APM-Maersk -- taken down for weeks by the NotPetya ransomware/wiper in 2017. 2.) Mediterranean Shipping Company -- hit in April 2020 by an unnamed malware strain that brought down its data center for days. 3.) COSCO -- brought down for weeks by ransomware in July 2018.

On top of these, we also have CMA CGM, which today took down its worldwide shipping container booking system after its Chinese branches in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou were hit by the Ragnar Locker ransomware. This marks for a unique case study, as there is no other industry sector where the Big Four have suffered major cyber-attacks one after the other like this. But while all these incidents are different, they show a preferential targeting of the maritime shipping industry.

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All Four of the World's Largest Shipping Companies Have Been Hit By Cyberattacks

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  • by bobthesungeek76036 ( 2697689 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @06:50PM (#60555632)
    Shipping companies don't spend enough for IT support???
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @06:54PM (#60555646)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        And then you could do email securely: Stay on text and non-executable formats (no MS word) and suddenly there is no vector. But people have to have their fancy formatting and graphics even in simple lists. Stupid.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            There is: RFC2822. It is always pure text. Attachments and other formats are simulated using MIME. MIME can easily be blocked, quarantined, cut, etc. on the mail server. The problem really is not email, but the stupid extensions and automated mechanisms 2nd rated and 3rd rated (MS) people have done later.

            Agree on the rest. A main problem is that almost all people are incredibly bad at risk management. For example, they cannot understand that a rare event that can kill the company still merits significant at

      • by antdude ( 79039 )

        I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

    • i.e. every time someone pays off ransomware, it funds more ransomware. Make it so every entity that funds criminals also has to compensate the next three victims who do NOT capitulate. Large scale ransomware would be functionally dead in a year.

    • All logistics outside of a few like Fedex have horrible IT. Many of the backbone industries are way behind and losing millions due to ancient software. But not to fear, app developers in San Fransisco will soon release the 173rd app for selecting a restaurant in the bay area.

  • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @06:51PM (#60555634) Homepage

    It is clear they are simply attacking every company, as they have been for decades. Companies are simply failing to secure their computer networks, relying on security trough obscurity, why would they attack us, meh. Not to forget being cheap, computer security is expensive, lots of people to hire, you can never rely trust an outside corporation, they have too much incentive to steal you data and insider trade your shares, they will cheat, whether at executive level or worker level, which is a fair and reasoned decision. So problem, if you do not absolutely need to connect that computer to the internet, if there is another way around it, I mean double entry of the data, is it really so hard and so much more secure, really secure, then you bloody do not connect it to the internet, unless you have staff onboard who can be trusted to secure it, every single one of them (one bribe and you are undone, same as for any cloud company). Don't connect to the internet and remove all data accessible ports and have an internal network security room, where a network security officer, allows data to be digitally added to the system at the only accessible data ports. Staff want to put data onto the internal network, they ask, provide a copy and the data is checked on an offnetwork computer and once cleared and reason validated, added to the internal computer network.

    Want it secure, that is what you have to do. The external communications network, you can rebuild that easy enough and not secured data is on it. Do you know why people are more secure than digital because you can see them being naughty and do something about it, digital not so much.

  • It's the Da Vinci virus, right? Gotta hack a Gibson to defeat it.
  • There is no "preference" in attackers here. There is organizations that style themselves as attractive targets. Everybody where there is money gets attacked. Some are easy targets, some are harder and many are hard enough that the usual attackers go someplace else.

    A recent comment on IT attacks and Ransomware I read compared these attacks to mold on the wall: They are always there and waiting and you never can get rid of the sources. But the real problem (in the causal sense, not assigning blame here) is th

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