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from the instead-of-csv-files-we-should-use...xls? dept.
A Suezmax container ship can hold over 10,000 TEUs or “Twenty Foot Equivalent Units”. Most containers carried are double this length – FEUs or “Forty Foot Equivalent Units” – but that still means in the region of 5,000 containers.
Only around one third of that cargo is on-deck though – most is hidden in the holds, under massive hatch covers. To get a container out from the bottom of the hold could involve removing 50 containers from that hatch cover, removing the hatch cover, then taking a further 8 containers to access the bottom of a stack.
Screw up the load plan and you create chaos. What if the load plan, which is just a CSV list or similar, is hacked and modified? No-one knows what container is where. instead of taking 24-48 hours to load and unload, it could take weeks to manually re-inventory the ship. Time is money for a ship. Lots of money. Blocking a port for a period whilst the mess is resolved incurs enormous costs and could even jeopardise supplies to an entire country.
Seems like more bang-for-the-buck than an IED [Improvised Explosive Device].
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday November 22 2017, @12:43PM (1 child)
Whoop, submitted before I completed my thoughts...
There is a distinct possibility that the machine could have been compromised in the way you indicated.... by hijacking some interrupts. If so, I was not aware of it as I do not remember booting up on a known good DOS disk to try to list things. I remember I used to have one disk drive with known good DOS boot and malware tracking tools on it where I had disabled the write logic, by physical surgery on the PCB, diverting the write command to do nothing but trip off a 74LS123 monostable with a piezo beeper on it... that particular disk drive was completely incapable of writing to disk. So I knew no way could IT ever get infected. I could install it as the "B:" floppy.
One of those early old-school 5 1/4" floppy drives which used a lot of discrete IC chips.
( I wanted to let malware *think* it was writing to the disk, but really all it did was position the head and beep the piezo. While a program like "KGB.exe" or similar small DOS tracing tools [textfiles.com] would be reporting what was executing at the time... )
The line he was telling me is that he was playing around with odd characters in the file name which would not display - which could have been a line of bull, knowing him.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:28PM
Well, in that case it's wrong to claim it on the design of the file system either, as those characters clearly had no place in the file names (there was a specification what characters were allowed/forbidden in file names). Possibly the OS implementation was to blame if it allowed those characters in file names against the specification; however I suspect he simply did a direct manipulation of the directory data on disk.