Expert warns of looming cyber security threats to maritime industry

Cyber security expert and Chief Executive Officer of 876 Technology Solutions Trevor Forrest has warned that maritime professionals must now be able to navigate and potentially respond to maritime cyber threats, saying this is a necessary skill as the evolving cyber security environment and related threats are placing the country's shipping and logistics systems at risk. 

His warning comes just weeks after several government websites in Europe and Asia went dark after a disclosure of ​critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language - which powers most of the internet, sent operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems.

The BBC and Wikipedia were among website operators who went offline, while the White House had indicated that it was working with top engineers to fix the vulnerability. 

On October 21 the developers released urgent new fixes to issues that had been lurking for years.

Forrest, speaking last week at a forum on National Cyber Security Awareness Day, said modern ships are floating data centres and Jamaican maritime experts must have the flexibility to respond.

“In 2017, Maersk was the largest shipping company in the world. They got hit by a cyber attack called NotPetya and it cost them over $300 million to recover from that attack. Now, if you contemplate an attack like that happening across the water to our systems in our terminal, think about that, what that would do to the shipping and logistics systems and industry here. Because the fact of the matter is, if we can't take the ships in, they're gonna go somewhere else. When you're training the, the mariners, the logistics managers, all of the different disciplines in the maritime space have to now start factoring in cybersecurity.”

Forrest, who is also a Senior advisor to Dr. Andrew Wheatley, Minister with Responsibility for Science & Technology said the aggressive push towards digitization also requires an advanced understanding of the associated threats.

 “Threat actors no longer need to have the kind of skill sets that people like me spent thirty years developing,” he noted. 

Instead, he said, they are now able to use artificial intelligence t”o build attacks, to build threats, and they're doing so in not weeks, but in minutes.”

"That's the threat today. But tomorrow, you have to consider a new threat, and it's a threat around quantum computing. It rears its head in perhaps ten years,” he predicted.