Evaluating cybersecurity in the maritime industry

Cybersecurity has become an important issue in the maritime industry due to many reported cyberattack incidents that caused a lot of economy loss, personal or company information breach, and so on. However, there is limited research for maritime cybersecurity in the existing literature. This research aims to conduct a risk assessment for cybersecurity in maritime sector. In order to achieve that research aim, the definition of cybersecurity and current maritime cybersecurity issues are firstly reviewed. Following that, 34 cyber threats under eight cyber threat categories in the maritime industry are identified through systematic literature review. To deal with the identified threats, seven risk control options are also identified. A questionnaire is designed based on the literature review and distributed to validate the identified cybersecurity threats and explore more that are not identified during the literature review. Based on the results of the questionnaire, several top threats under each threat category are selected to conduct another questionnaire to collect the likelihood, consequence, and probability of failure detection with degree-of-belief-based five-point Likert scale. Through a rule-based Bayesian Network analysis, we found that the category of “Phishing” and the threat of “Connecting your infected USB or removable media to connect computers/navigation systems” contribute the most to the maritime cybersecurity risk.