Appraisal of a Ship’s Cybersecurity efficiency: the case of piracy

New information technologies are beneficial for ship operations in terms of safety and utilisation of company resources. However, new cybercrime threats have emergedaffecting, both ship safety and security that need to be assessed and evaluated. At the moment, actions of the maritime industry to keep pace dealing with such threats are slow when compared with other business sectors. As a high concern, maritime pirates could take advantage of cybersecurity breaches to monitor ship activity and gain information for potential protective failures. In 2021 companies and seafarers should be able to demonstrate knowledge and safeguard policies of their companies. Nevertheless, there is limited discussion on how companies will educate seafarers for existing threats. Therefore, in this study, a risk-based methodology is proposed for evaluation of cybersecurity threats in the context of a piracy attack. STPA-SafeSec’s analysis is used to identify security threats, and FAHP is utilised for evaluating the severity of each security constraint. Audits on 15 ships with 315 seafarers indicated that there are significant security gaps mainly due to lack of awareness from operators and seafarers. However, physical security and network protection that already apply to ships are significant security strengths.