The Global Marine Transportation System Cybersecurity Symposium is coming to Australia for the first time in 2023. The event will be held in Sydney from 20-22 March. It brings together government representatives, the maritime shipping industry, international port companies, cybersecurity experts, non-government organizations (NGOs), and academia from across the globe, to discuss cybersecurity and building cyber resilience in the maritime sector.
Maritime cyber risk, as defined by the IMO, refers to a measure of the extent to which a technology asset could be threatened by a potential circumstance or event, which may result in shipping-related operational, safety or security failures as a consequence of information or systems being corrupted, lost or compromised.
Cyber risk management means the process of identifying, analysing, assessing and communicating a cyber-related risk and accepting, avoiding, transferring or mitigating it to an acceptable level, considering costs and benefits of actions taken to stakeholders
Last year the United States hosted the 3rd annual Global Marine Transportation (MTS) Cybersecurity Symposium on May 10-12, 2022. That Symposium built upon the successful maritime cybersecurity events held in The Hague in 2019, and by Denmark (virtually) in 2020, in order to promote international cooperation to strengthen cybersecurity and resilience in the MTS. The Symposium and its participants highlighted the criticality of the MTS and underscored that access to it are a matter of global and national security.
90% of the world’s goods come from ocean trade and flow through the MTS. This trade is comprised of the ships, personnel, handlers, cranes, and infrastructure needed for it to function. Malicious cyber actors pose a unique threat to this sector, as interconnectivity has grown expanding cyber-attack surfaces with potentially reverberating costs, to not only the MTS but the global economy.
Last year’s Symposium focused on ways to strengthen collaboration and to engage across boundaries, encompassing international organizations, industry, and the public sector. To advance these objectives, participants discussed shared challenges, explored existing and emerging best practices, and developed a roadmap to improve the global cybersecurity posture focused on the following:
-Expanding multi-stakeholder discussions and opportunities for cybersecurity advancement among international partners.
-Advancing consensus-based best practices to guide maritime cybersecurity standards.
-Collaborating on opportunities to upgrade maritime technologies and expand cybersecurity safeguards to systems in the public and private sector.
-Identifying best practices among stakeholders’ authorities and global shipping to maximize interoperability.
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