The Tokyo MOU, an inter-governmental cooperative organisation on port state control (PSC) in the Asia-Pacific region, has revealed it has been another high-profile name in shipping to have suffered a cyber attack.
The leading ship inspection body stated in its annual report, issued this week, that last July its database, APCIS, suffered an outage from a suspected cyber attack. The failure resulted in the unavailability of the whole system for a couple of weeks and the restoration of full data took several months, which caused serious difficulties for authorities and inspectors to make accurate and effective selection of ships for inspection and to transmit inspection data efficiently.
Shipping bodies that lead the industry have been a regular target for cyber attacks. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a fully-fledged United Nations entity, suffered a high-profile attack in October 2020, while class society DNV was also a ransomware victim earlier this year.
