Dive Brief:
- A ransomware attack on COSCO Shipping North America on Tuesday slowed electronic communications in the carrier's U.S. locations, according to multiple news reports.
- The Long Beach Press Telegram reports the carrier's cosco-usa.com website and toll free phone number were offline Tuesday afternoon. As of 10 a.m. Wednesday, the services remained unavailable, Supply Chain Dive found.
- "Local email and network telephone cannot work properly at the moment," COSCO said in an advisory released Wednesday. "We are trying best to make a full and quick recovery."
Dive Insight:
With this attack, COSCO is now a proxy for the entire industry: A test case to see if shipping lines learned from Maersk's experience in June 2017.
We still do not know exactly what hit COSCO, but reports suggest the cyberattack is far more limited than the one against A.P. Moller - Maersk, which the carrier estimates cost it up to $300 million. Many of the losses were due to lost bookings in its Damco forwarding division and terminal downtime.
Because of "some business cooperation in some regions" between the two carriers, COSCO sent customers an advisory stating, "we are now investigating and assessing the possible impacts and will make our efforts to minimize the impacts on our customers."
Maersk, at the time, lost access to its electronic booking system — a feature seemingly still available with COSCO, per Splash 247's report.
"All the vessels of our company are operating as normal, and our main business operation systems are performing stably," COSCO said in its advisory Wednesday.
But it may also be too early to tell how severe the attack is. Not Petya, also known as Nyetya, was a particularly virulent attack, spreading across major European offices to hit FedEx, too. Maersk took several weeks to regain its lost capabilities from that attack, resulting in significant lost revenues.
