UN Maritime Shipping Agency Forced Offline

The United Nations (UN) agency for international maritime shipping came under a cyber-attack early in October which took a number of services offline and there is speculation that the incident was a ransomware attack.

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is responsible for the regulation, safety and security of global shipping. It  has now revealedhat its website was “undergoing some technical issues.” It admitted a day later that these had actually been caused by malicious actors.

In an announcement, the IMO said its Global Integrated Shipping Information Systems (GISIS) database, document repository IMODOCS, and its Virtual Publications service had been affected by the attack but were now restored.  The organisation’s email and virtual meeting platforms were unaffected.

The IMO said restoration of the other unnamed services affected by the attack would take place “as soon as possible and as safe as possible....The interruption of web-based services was caused by a sophisticated cyber-attack against the organization’s IT systems that overcame robust security measures in place. IMO has ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification for its information security management system. IMO was the first UN organisation to get this certification in 2015,” the IMO explained.

The IMO headquarters file servers are located in the UK, with extensive backup systems in Geneva. The backup and restore system is regularly tested. Following the attack, the secretariat shut down key systems to prevent further damage from the attack.

The  French maritime shipping giant CMA CGM had a similar outage after a breach at its Chinese offices which knocked out some servers and applications.

IMO:     Infosecurity Magazine:      MyTechDecsions:  

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