Cosco’s operations in the US were hit by a cyber-attack on Tuesday, July 24. As a result its daily operations in the US were affected. The company’s operations outside the US are not affected, according to reports, while terminal operations are continuing unaffected.
As Cosco informed its customers, its network broke down, and some electronic communications were not available as a result.
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The company is now assessing the situation, in order to mitigate all possible problems and limit the impact of the attack in its operations. However, it does not seem that this attack has the scale of the cyber-attack against Maersk last year.
According to sources, the cyber-attack affected only Cosco’s operations in the US, and not those outside the country. In addition, ships and terminal operations are continuing without any problems.
Cyber-attacks in shipping are happening all too often. An example of this is the attack against Maersk. When it got hit, Maersk’s container ships stood still at sea and its 76 port terminals around the world ground to a halt. The recovery was fast, but within a brief period the organisation suffered financial losses up to USD300m covering, among other things, loss of revenue, IT restoration costs and extraordinary costs related to operations.
All began when an employee in Ukraine responded to an email which featuring the NotPetya Malware. The system affected and therefore operations practically had to be on hold until system’s restoration.