Maritime Cyber Risk Management – Is Your Data Safe?

Maritime cyber risk management: Cyber-crime is a huge and ever-growing danger to companies worldwide. Digital criminals are growing in confidence and their ability to gain from any potential security vulnerabilities increases year on year.

How big is the maritime cyber risk?

Whatever size your business is, you will face increasing cyber security threats and need to use the best available maritime cyber risk management. This is for 2 reasons:

• The rise of big data means all companies, whatever their size, have valuable data for hackers to use for criminal activity, including financial crime or corporate espionage.
• The rapidly increasing sophistication and number of cyber criminals – from single hackers to major crime organisations

Common threats include ransomware, stealing personal credentials, social engineering, phishing and distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. See more information on the UK National Crime Agency website.

Maritime Cyber Risk Management to Counter Threats

Businesses need to get serious about combating cyber-crime. You need to ensure that your company’s firewalls are well equipped to manage threats and potentially devastating data breaches.

The use of local drives and in-house networking systems can be costly and challenging to maintain. Reliable and functional security systems that guarantee secure access control and encryption depend on full time management and expertise.

So what is the solution?

1. Stop relying on your company’s local drives/systems/files to store data. To do so puts you at risk of losing years of aggregated data in the event of a breach.
2. Instead, take advantage of digitalization in the maritime industry and move to secure cloud storage. Cloud databases are maintained by experts with the latest comprehensive, multi-layered security technology, and the sole purpose of keeping valuable information secure.

The best cloud-based information management companies offer layers of security that cover all manner of cyber threats and have the additional benefit of being at the forefront of new developments in stopping cybercrime.

Other features include onboarding and offboarding processes to help assess when and how employees use external applications, which may threaten your overall security.

Move to cloud storage and give your business the time, space and peace of mind to concentrate on what you do best.

The importance of data and network redundancy

According to Gartner estimates, public cloud service workloads will suffer at least 60% fewer security incidents than those in traditional data center’s.

However, breaches can and will happen

• Those that have already been hacked
• Those who will be hacked in the future

It sounds dramatic, but the threat is that real. Damage limitation is therefore also a key element of cyber security, and one of the benefits of digitalization in the maritime industry is that this is now easier to achieve.

The way to do so is through data and network redundancy. This means you have duplicate/backup equipment, systems or links that immediately take over the function of equipment or transmission lines that fail. For example, the same piece of data could be held in two separate places, so if one is inaccessible the other is still available.

Using redundancy for maritime cyber risk management

Why is it so important to ensure you have data and network redundancy?

1. Ensuring that one piece of data is protected in two different places can safeguard against cyber-attacks and allow uninterrupted operations.
2. Network redundancy provides a backup of primary networking systems that may become unavailable.
3. The use of secondary routers and switches enables companies to continue operating without excessive delay.

Combating maritime cyber risk threats for your business

You can take some simple steps to protect your business against online security threats.

Having good cyber security measures in place will help protect your cashflow, your customer data and your reputation.

Key points for effective maritime cyber risk management are:

1. Make sure not only your cloud security company, but anyone managing your data is ISO/IEC 27001 certified, to ensure you are protected at the highest level. You’ll be secure in the knowledge that your data is safe and will benefit from a centrally managed framework, providing organisation-wide protection against evolving security threats.
2. Use a maritime-specific data storage company to ensure they are familiar with your key needs, threats, and digitalization in the maritime industry
3. Make sure you have a secure back up of all your data and systems, by setting up robust data and network redundancy.

About HiLo’s maritime cyber risk management

At HiLo, as a maritime-specific data analysis company, we help customers make the most of the benefits of digitalization in the maritime industry. We offer world-leading predictive analytics for maritime safety, providing insights and practical tools to prevent high impact incidents at sea.

Our success is based on a huge amount of data provided to us from over 3500 vessels and 55 companies in our ‘fleet’. To enable our customers to share this sensitive data required us to build a single, secure, ISO27001-certified database.

With data fully backed up, you not only keep your crew safe – but also your data. Our database gives you a secure backup for your critical information, improving your maritime cyber risk management.