Logistics is such a broad field that it can be hard to define. At its heart, logistics refers to any efforts to get people and products from one area to another. Trucking companies, railroads and even airlines all have a part to play in this industry. When it comes to thinking about cybersecurity planning, land-based logistics firms have been especially progressive. That’s because they’ve had to protect their assets from bad actors who seek to seize control of them and take shipments to unseen destinations.
One of the biggest problems in the modern logistics space is how vast the industry has gotten. Every single product intended for a mass audience has to travel in some way. That’s made companies in the sector particularly attractive to those who want to cause harm to major industrial players. Forward-thinking specialists have elected to develop some very innovative ways of addressing these problems.
New Ideas In The Logistics Industry
Social engineering is the number one threat impacting the industry. All of the technological solutions in the world would be meaningless if bad actors are able to convince someone that they’re an individual with authority and therefore need some piece of information. Information technology managers have come up with a drastically new way of thinking about the issue that’s yielding some great results.
Rather than focusing on it as a computer problem, logistics industry insiders are instead looking at this as a training opportunity. Teaching people how to deal with potential social engineers is far more effective than developing some sort of technology to screen them out. Carefully listening to voicemail messages to see whether or not they’re from the people who claim to sent them can slash the risk of these attacks far more than some algorithm could.
Cyberspace Dangers In Logistics
Not all cyberspace threats directly involve people either. Some of them aren’t the result of bad actors so much as they are of negligence. Errors made by contractors and data corruption are both serious issues. Cybersecurity managers should be aware of disk storage maladies. Not properly shutting drives down or misconfiguring their encryption options could render customer records and shipment details unreadable in literally seconds.
Granted, strong encryption features are an important part of a modern logistics security strategy so they shouldn’t be counted out. A good idea is to combine these features with something like a storage system journal service for the best possible combination. For instance, someone might store everything inside of a drive that’s both encrypted and compressed for performance reasons.
Database structures used to keep track of shipping containers may then be fitted with a transaction journal that marks whether or not the database has been written to. Once this infrastructure is in place, the database could protect itself against bad writes. If a piece of software were to suddenly stop working, then the database would recall all of the last transactions on the next start.
No matter what ideas come into play, though, it’s clear that logistics companies are going to be grappling with countless cybersecurity issues. That means they’re need to reach out to other groups in order to stay safe.
