Dive Brief:
- COSCO Shipping said Monday its "network applications in the Americas have been totally recovered" after a cyberattack last week disabled systems in the U.S., Canada, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Uruguay.
- Telephone, email and electronic data exchange services have been restored, according to the carrier. Since the attack, COSCO customers have been sending booking requests to more than a dozen contingency emails to ensure shipments. These emails will remain online "for the service continuity."
- Shippers booking through Los Angeles / Long Beach, however, must still use the temporary emails as the segment's customer service email remains offline.
Dive Insight:
A global network of service representatives, social media and temporary email addresses saved the day for COSCO after a purported ransomware attack shut down local communication.
For five days, shippers had to navigate 50 new email addresses specific to the tasks they needed to accomplish, such as filing with the Federal Maritime Commission ([email protected]), verified gross mass filings on exports ([email protected]) or new bookings ([email protected]).
COSCO, meanwhile, had to accommodate teams to respond to a flood of emails or social media posts and route shippers to the right email service line.
In one Facebook exchange, COSCO replied to a shipper whose booking cutoff was at 4 p.m. Friday by saying "our teams are working through the e-mails as quickly as they can and will respond to you as soon as possible ... we hope you can sit tight with us a bit longer, and we appreciate your understanding and patience as we continue to work through this."
As of Monday morning, the same shipper said her rail billing "has still not gone through." Within minutes, she received a similar assurance from COSCO the "staff will be working as quickly as possible" to address her shipment.
In separate advisories, COSCO has accepted the cyberattack may delay some aspects of its service.
The carrier on Monday updated its Rail Ramp Storage and Per Diem policy, extending the window for those fees by up to 5 days for containers affected by the network issues. Vessels are operating as normal and were not affected by the communication outage, according to COSCO's notices.
"We are working at full capacity to process all service requests received previously, and the service response is expected to be back on track within this week," COSCO said in its latest notice. "The global networks of COSCO SHIPPING Lines are safe and stable, and our global business operations are steady and orderly."
