Building Maritime Cybersecurity Capacity Against Ransomware Attacks

Abstract

Ransomware is considered among the top threats that organizations have to face, and one that is not expected to go away anytime soon. Cyber criminals have turned ransomware into a profitable business by targeting environments in which they can maximize the attack’s impact and their profits. The Maritime domain is a lucrative environment as it supports many aspects of the supply chain, making it a high priority target for cyber criminals. Recent ransomware incidents in the Maritime domain have demonstrated the necessity to increase the cyber risk awareness and readiness levels, to effectively address this threat. To defend and minimize the risk to get infected and/or recover if impacted by a ransomware, the required cybersecurity capacity needs to be developed. This can be achieved by educating and training all Maritime stakeholders, according to their role and responsibilities, across a strategic, operational, and/or tactical level. The challenge is to determine the capabilities that the Maritime stakeholders need to develop across the different levels, so they can exercise sound judgement and procedures when faced with a ransomware incident. This work presents an innovative training curriculum that was developed to build cybersecurity capacity in the Maritime domain and defend against ransomware attacks. A highlight of the proposed curriculum is that it specifies structured walkthrough practice to promote active learning and make education memorable and actionable. The proposed curriculum targets to provide design directions to the cybersecurity community to develop new training curricula to address future ransomware attacks.