The Daily View: Attack of the clones
Your latest edition of Lloyd’s List’s Daily View — the essential briefing on the stories shaping shipping
THE ability to track global maritime trade via a digital ping on our screens has spawned myriad innovations, streamlined trading and created more efficient global markets.
But the humble Automatic Identification System — the ubiquitous technology that broadcasts a ship’s position, identification, course and speed — comes with some in-built flaws.
AIS was never intended to deliver what it has ultimately become. It was developed as a safety tool to aid collision avoidance.
When its use was mandated back in 2002, nobody was anticipating the increasingly sophisticated state-sponsored spoofing of satellite signals that we are witnessing today.
Apparently nobody even saw fit to worry about the default password of systems being set to “0000” either.
They were simpler times, when using “password” as your password fell into the realm of cybersecurity norms.
But times have changed.
Entire voyages are being fabricated to circumvent sanctions scrutiny and increasingly elaborate plots to clone the digital identities of scrapped — or entirely fictional — ships as decoys, is now becoming a routine risk that is more often than not disappearing under the radar.
Our lead story today details a 30-strong fleet of vessels flaunting the maritime equivalent of cloned number plates with little in the way of regulatory fire-power available to stop them.
The cold reality is that there is currently a technical knowledge gap, even among those who want to track these digital doppelgangers.
The real innovators and professionals are the ones dreaming up ever-more obscure spoofing techniques. The international regulatory regime chasing the false flags, fictitious companies and spoofed digital exhausts of digitally manipulated ghost ships, are analogue laggards in a world of cybercrime they can’t keep up with.
To date, these clone wars have been limited to the murkier end of sanctions circumvention; but as coastal states increasingly worried about grey-zone aggression are belatedly realising, the porous nature of our digital view of trade comes with some worrying security risks.
The difference between tracking a digital signal and understanding how verifiable information can be — and is being — manipulated, is no longer an esoteric point of data quality. It is a question of international security.
The expertise to tell the difference between real ships and digital ghosts exists; it is just that at the moment, it is not always in the places where it is needed.
Be warned, not all vessel-tracking data is created equally.
Richard Meade
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List