Tokyo MOU published its Annual Report for 2022, indicating that it conducted 24,894 inspections, involving 15,853 individual ships. However, a cyber attack caused problems in its Port State Control (PSC) platform for several weeks, troubling operations.
A Concentrated Inspection Campaign (CIC) on STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping) was conducted from 1 September to 30 November 2022 jointly with the Paris MoU. A total of 6,953 PSC inspections were conducted by the member Authorities, of which 5,908 (84.97%) were with a CIC inspection. A total of 1,041 CIC related deficiencies were found on 802 ships representing 13.57% of the CIC inspections.
Comparing with 232 detentions out of 6,953 inspections or 3.34% detention rate during the period, the outcome of the campaign appears to indicate a relatively high level of compliance with STCW.
Deficiencies
Out of 24,894 inspections, there were 12,678 inspections where ships were found with deficiencies. Since the total number of individual ships operating in the region was estimated at 26,259, the inspection rate in the region was approximately 60% in 2022.
The highest number of CIC related deficiencies were relating to the Records of rest 289 (27.76%), followed by Voyage or passage plan 253 (24.30%) and Crew familiarization with Emergency Systems 114 (10.95%). 20 (0.34%) of the 5,908 ships subject to a CIC inspection were detained for CIC related deficiencies.
Detentions
The cyber attack
The Tokyo MOU PSC database, APCIS, suffered an outage in July 2022 due to the unforeseen reason, likely a cyber-attack. The failure resulted the unavailability of the whole system for a couple of weeks and the restoration of full data for several months, which not only caused serious difficulties for Authorities and PSCOs to make accurate and effective selection of ships for inspection and to transmit inspection data efficiently and timely, but also created inconveniences for various parties, individuals and users from the industry, who regularly view and check Tokyo MOU PSC data.
Taking the lesson from this incident, the Tokyo MOU will pay higher attention to the matter of cyber-risks and take all possible measures to enhance cyber security to prevent the recurrence.
To remind, around the same time the Port of London Authority as well as Port of Los Angeles reported incidents of cyber attacks. According to Allianz Cyber Risks Trends of 2022, although frequency reduced by 23% globally during the first half of 2022, the total still exceeded that of the full years of 2017, 2018 and 2019, while Europe saw attacks surge over this period.
