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A Verizon security report has revealed that pirates hacked a shipping company's content management system to figure out which ships were worth boarding, and where the high dollar cargo was located.
A shipping company raised the alarm when it found that repeated attacks from pirates had become suspiciously targeted, with raiders able to pinpoint the most lucrative items to steal.
Instead of typical attacks, in which a ship’s crew would be held hostage for days while pirates scoured its contents, their captors appeared to immediately head for certain containers, being able to seek them out by reading the bar codes on the side of the crates.
Security experts at Verizon found that the pirates
had been able to hack into the company’s shipping management system, inserting code into the system
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so that they could pull data from it about future shipments and routes.
Because the shipping company’s directory was not restricted to local access, the hackers were able to access it remotely and discreetly. This allowed them to track the vessels that were carrying the most valuable cargo and where to take it from. The shipping company said the pirates had known where the most valuable items were on several occasions over the course of several months.
Unfortunately for the pirates, their commands to the database were sent in plain text instead of being encrypted, enabling their patterns to be found out and for the security team to identify and disable the breach.
For more of the Telegraph story: www.telegraph.co.uk
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