The maritime industry is an enticing target for hackers. The Port of Los Angeles (the Port) alone facilitated about $276 billion in trade last year, and the International Chamber of Shipping estimated that the total value of world shipping was around $14 trillion in 2019. The Port has plans to construct a multi-million-dollar cyber intelligence facility as a hub for information sharing between the public and private sectors to thwart the increasing attacks on the maritime and logistics industries. This facility, the Cyber Resilience Center, is one of the first of its type to be built in the United States. The Port’s Executive Director, Gene Seroka, said, “What we’ve noticed over time is that the potential penetrations and cyber threats have grown each and every year,” including incidents like the 2017 NotPetya attacks that affected shipping lines, the 2018 ransomware targeting of the Port of Long Beach, and the October 2020 ransomware attack on CMA CGM S.A., a French transportation and container shipping company. Seroka said that as the threat become more evident, the Port “needed to find a way to bring the private sector into this space as well.” The Cyber Resilience Center is expected to go live by the end of 2021. Participants in this information exchange will be able to share information anonymously through the platform, which will standardize data from different companies’ cybersecurity tools. The Port’s Chief Information Officer will lead the project, which will operate alongside the Port’s cybersecurity operations center.
Seroka said that he hopes the Cyber Resilience Center will be a model for other large ports across the United States since information-sharing is such a vital defensive tool. As the shipping industry becomes even more digitized, cyber threats will require facilities such as ports to prioritize set data standards, business rules and open architecture for facilitating information sharing in a secure, protected manner.
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