GoKawiilAuthor: Ben Wilkens, cybersecurity principal engineer, NMFTA
When they see an 80,000-pound vehicle rolling down the highway at 65 miles per hour, the first thing most people think about is not cybersecurity.
The fact is, these massive vehicles are rolling networks packed with a wide range of communications systems, onboard sensors, cloud connected devices, and Wi-Fi signals. In other words, these mobile assets are loaded with potential attack surfaces.
Trucking is the backbone of one of the critical infrastructure sectors that is central to daily life in North America.
Trucks bring the fuel to our power stations, the medicine to our hospitals; they transport the food to our grocery stores and the fuel to our gas stations. Without trucks, many of these critical supplies run out within three days.
Cybercriminals have realized that this places an enormous amount of pressure on trucking and logistics companies to maintain 100% uptime, and they leverage this with ransomware and extorsion attacks every day.
This is the threat landscape that those working in cybersecurity in the transportation sector, from offensive security practitioners hunting for ways to penetrate the onboard systems that keep these vehicles rolling, to defenders securing the enterprises that support them, see when they look at trucks on the highway.
Atypical Threat Vectors
The threats posed by cybercrime in the transportation sector do not end with traditional cyberattacks. Cyber-enabled cargo criminals take traditional cyberattack techniques and use them to facilitate the theft of physical cargo.
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