Maritime Cybersecurity: use cases

The OT behind a harbour is an estate in its own right: terminal operating systems, gate automation, crane and gantry controls and the vessel-to-shore data exchange. A port stopped by a compromised control system does not care whether the intrusion was clever, and an attacker who cannot reach a ship at sea can often reach the terminal it is about to call at. A port is also critical national infrastructure, so this work is one strand of the same resilience programme that covers power, water and transport. Infrastructure hardening and continuous defensive operations reduce and watch the attack surface, and the maritime suite extends that discipline to the terminal and the fleet.

Navigation, propulsion and control systems are protected at sea, where connectivity is intermittent and the consequences of a compromised bridge are severe. Passive detection on the NMEA 2000 bus listens rather than injects, so it watches the traffic that steers and positions the ship without becoming one more thing that can fail the equipment it protects. Shore-governed edge compute handles the incident-response reality maritime security tends to ignore: the responder is thousands of miles from the casualty and the crew are the first, sometimes only, hands on the system, so patches, backups and recovery have to be pushed and verified from shore and survive a satellite link that drops mid-transfer.

Fleet monitoring means a shore security team sees every vessel from one picture, spots the same intrusion pattern arriving across hulls, and does not wait for a master to phone in a problem the ship's crew cannot diagnose. That matters most for a mixed estate: a national port authority and a naval fleet under one ministry can be covered across vessels, terminals and the supply chain by a single accountable team. There is no foreign-government reporting line, so a mixed naval and commercial estate stays under one line of accountability. Much of the installed base is decades old and was never designed for a hostile network, which is why the work starts with an assessment of the estate as it actually is.

Ships carry a rotating crew and a long tail of equipment vendors who expect remote sessions into navigation, engine and cargo systems for diagnostics and updates. The most common way onto a ship's OT is a legitimate account, not a novel exploit. Privileged-access control decides who reaches which system, when, and with a record of what they did. The eight-module fleet platform, spanning firewall, privileged access, detection, satellite management and AI-assisted threat operations with IACS E26 compliance, is built around the IT-versus-OT distinction rather than bolting office tools onto a bridge.

The defence is informed by vulnerability research on production vessel control systems, including findings rated at the top of the severity scale. Knowing exactly how these systems break is what lets the suite defend them, rather than guessing at a generic threat. The same portfolio runs authorised red-teaming against vessels and ports and continuous defensive operations for fleets at sea, so assessment, testing and monitoring can be procured through one channel rather than assembled from separate contractors. Running both through the same accountable channel means a red-team finding drives the defensive programme rather than sitting in a report from someone else.

A high-fidelity cyber range with real maritime protocols and PLCs, to IACS E27, lets crews train, certify and rehearse an incident on realistic bridge and navigation systems before they meet one at sea. The people who stand the watch practise on the environment they actually operate, not an abstraction. A maritime cyber programme is also designed to sit inside maritime domain awareness: it hardens the ships and ports that hold the picture together, while ocean surveillance detects and tracks vessels across the exclusive economic zone and fisheries analytics turn that sensing into enforcement leads, all through one non-aligned channel. Audited metrics are not published on the reference page, so a buyer should ask for evidence against its own fleet and regulatory framework.