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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: 3, Informative) by isj on Wednesday November 22 2017, @02:47PM (2 children)
When I worked in the shipping industry 17 years ago the cranes were starting to get cameras with OCR in them so they could pick up the container number (eg. HLCU 123456-7). I can't speak for all ports and cranes but the article's speculation "No-one knows what container is where" is unlikely. The cranes also measure the weight of each container as them lift them, and that information is sent (realtime or a few hours delayed) to the captain, the stevedore, the carrier, custom's office, etc.
Also, the ship has sensors for pitch and roll, so if many containers have the wrong weight the captain would quickly realize it and stop the loading until it could be investigated.
That leaves the idea of making the load top-heavy. You couldn't do that blatantly as either the crane operator, the foreman or the captain would go "why are we stowing all those heavy containers at the top?". You would have to make small changes to the weight and hope the captain doesn't get the updated bayplan before he casts the mooring.
There was a similar discussion on the green site back in 2013: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/12/2126222/container-ship-breaks-in-two-sinks [slashdot.org]
For those curious about shipping failures (ships, trucks, barges, planes, ...) there is a gallery: http://www.cargolaw.com/gallery.html [cargolaw.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 22 2017, @09:28PM (1 child)
The objective isn't to confuse which container is which. It's to get them loaded all wrong. One attack is to simply get them loaded in the wrong order such that a ship with multiple ports of call ends up having to unload half the cargo to get to the right container which should have loaded on top but ended up below. The weights and id numbers of each container will be correct and they'll know exactly where it is, it will just be in a bad place for unloading.
The other is that the containers (still identified correctly) get loaded in a way that makes the load less stable. Perhaps it's noticed, but perhaps since the weights and ids all match up and they are following the instructions, they'll assume it must be safe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @05:16PM
Most improbable.
They monitor the vessel, as a vessel, during loading and unloading. If the load is not up to spec, they stop loading. And quite likely, lawsuits follow because you're not talking about a coupla benjamins here.
As for counter-optimal load schedules for efficiency, that's also highly improbable because that's also an aspect of what is checked.
Basically, if either of those cases is screwed up large numbers of the crew and stevedores and office staff are likely to be fired or otherwise penalised. And the captain, if he lets it go, may very well find himself explaining his choices to a judge.
It's exotic and weird, but the shipping industry is quite risk-averse, and has centuries of bad examples to draw from. Turns out, they have rules that protect them from things like drunk or overtired pilots, through to idiotic or corrupt machine operators.