Partner Philip Thomas and associate Voirrey Davies discuss the importance of cybersecurity in shipping. Some of the topics include the risks, examples of cyberattacks and tips on how to prevent them. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Trading Straits brings legal and business insights at the intersection of the shipping and energy sectors. This podcast series offers trends, developments, challenges and topics of interest from Reed Smith litigation, regulatory and finance lawyers across our network of global offices. If you have any questions about the topics discussed on this podcast, please do contact our speakers. Voirrey: Welcome back to Trading Straits. My name is Voirrey Davies and I'm an associate in the transportation group based in our London office. I'm joined today by Philip Thomas, who's a partner in our emerging technologies team, also based in London. And we're going to be talking to you today about shipping and cybersecurity, with the key question being, what do I need to know? So Philip, I think we should kick it off with the main part of the podcast, which is what is cybersecurity? Philip: So I think of cybersecurity as being how people, organizations, and even governments protect themselves against cyber attacks, and also how they mitigate the impact of those attacks occurring. To me, cybersecurity is distinct from cyber risk. When I think about cyber risk, I think about the risk of adverse consequences flowing from a cyber breach, so financial loss, business disruption, and so forth. And it's also distinct from data breach. We often find people using cyber breach and data breach interchangeably. A data breach typically has the theft or acquisition of data as its main focus, whereas a cyber breach is broader and may involve the data breach, but may not have data as the main focus. So you're aware of cyber incidents in the shipping sector, do you have any examples of what those cyber incidents look like and any recent examples to share Voirrey: Yeah absolutely. I mean as you said there's a quite big difference really between the data breach and then some sort of cyber attack that has happened. Back in 2017 there was a widely publicized cyber attack on Maersk, which essentially paralyzed their global network. And that was a ransomware attack. So these are things that are happening. And more recently, we've been seeing a lot of GPS spoofing. This is nothing new, but there's definitely been an uptick in those kind of matters, particularly from hostile states. It has a really big impact on the actual navigation system of the vessels that are out at sea. Not only are we seeing things to do with assets at sea, we're also seeing attacks on infrastructure in ports. The advent of kind of these really clever crane systems in container ports means that they are quite susceptible to any type of cyber attack that could render them unable to operate. And, you know, thinking of it on a kind of a wider basis. If you don't take your cyber security seriously in the shipping industry, then you can be very exposed. The impact of a cyber attack in shipping can be much more serious than in other sectors, because it can impact the safety and the seaworthiness of vessels, which essentially could mean life or death situations or significant damage to the asset, to the environment, to the cargo on board. Where we've seen with GPS spoofing, vessels can be led into hostile territory and potentially seized which is you know an absolute nightmare for everybody involved in that sort of situation. With this advent of real-time data to vessels directly into the navigation systems it's yet another access route for you know a hostile entity to try and kind of get into the cyber system of those vessels and as you know some of the examples I've just discussed there, organizations can be held to ransom. Ransomware is called that for that very reason. And unless you pay up, you can't get control of your systems or your vessels. And sometime