Cyber security on board ships

With more and more of the ships’ operations depending on various forms of digital technology, there is a clear and present risk of the breach of digital security. There have been actual incidents in the past like the ‘Maersk Incident’ (hyperlink).

The complete Maritime industry has realised this leading to many changes in the way the vessels use the Information Technology and Operational Technology.

Even IMO has been discussing it for some time and the Maritime Safety Committee, at its 98th session in June 2017, also adopted Resolution MSC.428(98) - Maritime Cyber Risk Management in Safety Management Systems. The resolution encourages administrations to ensure that cyber risks are appropriately addressed in existing safety management systems (as defined in the ISM Code) no later than the first annual verification of the company's Document of Compliance after 1 January 2021.

Extract from MSC.428(98)

1. AFFIRMS that an approved safety management system should take into account cyber risk management in accordance with the objectives and functional requirements of the ISM Code;
2. ENCOURAGES Administrations to ensure that cyber risks are appropriately addressed in safety management systems no later than the first annual verification of the company's Document of Compliance after 1 January 2021;
3. ACKNOWLEDGES the necessary precautions that could be needed to preserve the confidentiality of certain aspects of cyber risk management;
4. REQUESTS Member States to bring this resolution to the attention of all stakeholders.

There are many set standards that have been used to define the guidelines and best practices.

We at PiscesER1 have successfully completed the full implementation of the Cyber Safe planning, documentation and implementation on board the fleet of one of our customers.

The advantages of cybersecurity are:

This can be achieved by the smart use of this data in PMS, using modern tools like Machine Learning, Prediction Models, Random Forests.

Some of questions hounding the business and operations are detection of anomalies in equipment and system performance. Setting and predicting of the warning life of any component, very similar to distance to empty in our cars. Finally if failures do occur, then we can use the data for cause identification, thus improving the predictions as we go ahead.

At PiscesER1 we compare the gains very similar to many high value industries like Finance and Production.

There will be just in time maintenance thus reducing the overall maintenance cost. Even purchase can be made just in time and inventory maintained based on predicted maintenance.

The customer satisfaction and retention will be enhanced by providing them with KPIs and health scores of the vessel systems.

Discover patterns with maintenance related issues and develop solutions for the same.

We would like to call is CPPMS – controlled, predicted, planned maintenance system.