A commercial vessel suffered a significant malware attack in February, prompting the US Coast Guard to issues an advisory to all shipping companies: Here be malware.
In February 2019, a large ship bound for New York City radioed the US Coast Guard warning that the vessel was “experiencing a significant cyber incident impacting their shipboard network.”
The Coast Guard led an incident-response team to investigate the issue and found that malware had infected the ships systems and significantly degraded functionality. Fortunately, essential systems for the control of the vessel were unimpeded.
On July 8, the military branch issued an alert to commercial vessels strongly recommending that they improve their cybersecurity in the wake of the incident, including segmenting shipboard networks, enforcing per-user passwords and roles, installing basic security protections, and patching regularly.
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