Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 22 2017, @03:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the instead-of-csv-files-we-should-use...xls? dept.

Now that's cyber-terrorism:

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].


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @05:27AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @05:27AM (#600055)

    Wouldn't happen without a lot of other things happening first, such as hacking internal sensors, instruments on the bridge, and the brains of the people actually monitoring the vessel while it's being loaded.

    Or did you think they did it blind?