10.11.2026
Marine cyber risk: When digital disruption reaches the water
The maritime industry has always understood interconnected risk. A delay at one port can ripple through supply chains; a problem aboard one vessel can affect cargo owners, charterers and customers thousands of miles away. But as vessels, ports and the infrastructure around them become increasingly digital, a different form of interconnected risk is becoming harder to ignore: cyber risk.
Cyber incidents in the marine sector are no longer simply an IT issue. Recent events have interrupted cargo handling, taken shared systems offline and disrupted fleet-management services. At the same time, greater connectivity between shore-based IT, vessel systems, operational technology (OT) and third-party providers creates the potential for digital incidents to have increasingly physical consequences.
The challenge for marine organisations is therefore not simply preventing a cyberattack. It is understanding where a digital failure could become an operational one, and ensuring the business can keep functioning when technology is unavailable.
When an IT problem becomes an operational problem
One of the clearest lessons from recent incidents is that an attacker does not necessarily need to compromise a vessel's propulsion or navigation systems to cause significant disruption.
In July 2023, ransomware disrupted the Port of Nagoya’s unified terminal system, suspending container import and export processing. Cargo loading and unloading stopped, with consequences extending into downstream manufacturing and parts flows.
This incident does not required us to imagine a Hollywood-style takeover of a ship.
The lesson is arguably more mundane, and for that reason more important: ordinary digital systems can represent extraordinary operational dependencies.
If container movements, cargo release, gate operations or terminal processes depend upon a central digital platform, the availability of that platform becomes part of the organisation's operational resilience.
The third-party problem
There is another characteristic of marine cyber risk that deserves attention: concentration.
Shipping depends on an extensive ecosystem of software providers, ports, satellite communications, terminal systems and specialist suppliers. That interconnectedness creates efficiency, but it can also allow disruption at one organisation to affect many others.
In January 2023, ransomware affected dedicated DNV ShipManager servers. DNV shut the affected servers down and rebuilt the environment. Crucially, onboard offline functionality remained available and other onboard systems were unaffected, allowing vessel operations to continue despite disruption to shore synchronisation.
There is an important resilience lesson here.
Connectivity should enable operations, not become a prerequisite for safe operations.
For vessel operators, ports and other marine businesses, understanding third-party dependencies should therefore extend beyond knowing which suppliers have access to the network. Organisations should identify which fleet platforms, port-community systems, satellite providers and terminal platforms could become single points of failure, and whether supplier compromise or loss-of-service scenarios have genuinely been exercised
When cyber risk becomes physical
The more difficult question is what happens when digital dependency reaches operational technology.
Modern vessels contain interconnected cargo, ballast, propulsion, navigation, monitoring and safety systems. The risk becomes particularly significant where these environments can be reached from shore or through vendor networks.
The September 2026 Vivit Africa LNG incident provides an important illustration, while also requiring caution.
The vessel aborted a planned discharge in Italy following a malfunction affecting systems used to monitor cargo parameters and subsequently diverted towards Spain. Crew sources alleged interference involving pressure, safety-valve and boil-off-gas controls, but the precise cause remained unresolved. The incident should therefore be viewed as a cyber-physical near miss rather than a confirmed cyberattack.
Nevertheless, the scenario raises an important question for the wider sector:
What happens when the digital system you lose is responsible for controlling a physical process?
Once cyber risk reaches cargo-control, safety or other operational systems, the potential consequences move beyond lost data and inaccessible laptops. Understanding these dependencies before an incident occurs is therefore fundamental.
Designing for failure, not just prevention
The instinctive response to growing cyber risk is often to add more cybersecurity controls. Strong authentication, network segmentation, restricted remote access and monitoring are important, but prevention cannot be the entire resilience strategy.
Organisations also need to assume that, eventually, something may become unavailable.
That changes the questions being asked.
- Can IT be isolated without stopping gates, cranes, cargo release or vessel operations?
- Can a vessel continue safely if digital cargo monitoring or shore synchronisation disappears?
- Are manual workarounds actually tested at realistic volumes rather than simply documented?
- Can control and safety systems be independently recovered?
- And where third parties can reach vessel or terminal OT, is that access appropriately controlled, time-bound, authenticated and recorded?
These are not simply cybersecurity questions. They are business continuity, engineering and operational resilience questions.
Building resilience
There is no single control capable of removing marine cyber risk. Instead, resilience comes from layers.
Understand the dependency
Maintain an accurate inventory of critical IT and OT systems and understand which operational processes rely upon them. Document dependencies on external fleet, terminal, satellite and port-community platforms.
Separate where it matters
Segmentation between corporate IT and safety or operational environments can limit the ability of an incident to spread. The ability to operate critical functions independently or offline can further reduce dependence upon connected systems.
Control the route in
Remote support is invaluable in distributed maritime operations, but access to critical environments should be controlled. The marine risk assessment should consider who can remotely access vessel or terminal OT and whether that access is MFA-protected, time-bound and recorded.
Know what normal looks like
Monitoring should extend beyond traditional IT security events to potentially significant operational changes, including PLC logic, setpoints, alarm suppression and unusual remote sessions.
Practise operating without technology
Recovery plans and manual processes need to work under real operational conditions. A workaround capable of processing a handful of transactions during an exercise may be very different from one capable of sustaining a busy port or vessel operation for several days.
Physical Damage - Spoilage
Cyber insurance has an important role to play when incidents occur. But, as with cyber-driven spoilage risk, insurance represents only one part of resilience.
Brit's recent article ‘Spoilage: When cyber attacks turn up the heat’ makes this distinction clearly. As digital technology becomes embedded within physical processes, effective resilience requires organisations to consider the operational consequences of a cyber event before an incident occurs.
Marine organisations face the same challenge.
The objective should not simply be to ask
“Can somebody hack this system?”
It should be to ask:
“If this system disappears tomorrow, what happens next?”
For a shipping company, terminal operator or port, the answer could involve considerably more than IT.
It could determine whether cargo moves, whether vessels operate, whether customers can be served and, ultimately, whether a digital incident remains digital.
That is why the next stage of marine cyber resilience is not just about protecting systems.
It is about safeguarding the operations that now depend on those systems.
To find out more or discuss cyber risk, get in touch with our cyber team.
