For most of history, cargo theft was primarily a crime of opportunity. People stole products being shipped simply because they were able to get close enough to them to take them. Once wireless communications became common, some criminals started to listen into the maritime radio bands to get extra information to help them carry out their crimes. Nevertheless, these crimes were generally low-tech.
Recently, it’s become common to steal cargo in transit by cracking into distant computer networks and getting shipment data. In the most extreme cases, people actually gain remote control of documents and change them so that they can have goods shipped to them instead of the legitimate buyer. Say someone altered a bill of lading so that the could change out the original destination for one close to them. Once the goods get delivered, the might even have someone on hand to make it look like a completely legal transaction. When this happens, the products in question have a tendency to completely vanish. Fortunately, there are technical solutions to help put a stop to these crimes and increase cybersecurity.
Using Software To Stop Cargo Theft
Perhaps the number one reason that cargo theft continues to grow worldwide is related to weak data security, which allows bad actors to gain control of network resources to begin with. Individual user accounts should never have more privileges than they absolutely need to allow their owners to do their jobs. Anybody who needs to see shipping reports or customer lists should have read-only access unless they really need to edit a form. Even this simple type of security would go a long way toward preventing people from rerouting loads to different locations.
Other mitigation strategies include those that have been effective against a wide variety of other types of threats. Regular hotfixes and proper firewalls are very helpful when it comes to blocking outside requests. Education is very important as well, since individual staffers need to know not to open up any kind of attachment that could potentially compromise their own terminals. Simply setting up a few solid email filters could even block out most if not all of the common types of scams that bad actors use to gain control of a situation.
Threats That Increase Cargo Theft Incidence Rates
Though data-driven security measures have helped to assuage some of the concerns the industry currently faces, the number of threats continues to grow. As well as social engineering attacks, ransomware seems to factor into many kinds of cargo theft operations. More conventional network worms are also a major issue, since these can spread automatically without the need for human intervention. Whenever a port is left unprotected online, there’s always the chance for a worm to sneak its way in. Once there, it can offer its operators the chance to reroute cargo and create detailed maps that show an entire overview of a company’s logistics operations.
Fortunately, these can once more be stopped by the same software tools that block many of the older types of attacks.
