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Sinking Container Ships by Hacking Load Plan Software

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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].

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  • (Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:51PM (2 children)

    by ewk (5923) on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:51PM (#600168)

    Except that a container-ship in port for (say) 5 weeks probably doesn't give you as much TV coverage as a well-placed and well-timed explosion of a IED.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @05:26PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @05:26PM (#600262)
    And it doesn't look like it'll actually be a huge real world threat - pwn enough ships and people might actually start making backups of the load plans.

    What are the odds those computers on the ships don't ever die AND someone loses the usb drive/floppies at the same time? So some ships will probably have ways to cope with such stuff already.

    Seems more like someone learned something they didn't know before and is trying for their 15 minutes of fame.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:24PM (#600418)

      So I guess it's back to TELEDILDONICS!