We hacked a ship

Stephan Gerling - Yacht Hacking from SatCOM to engine control

DEF CON 27 Hack the Sea Village

From The Digital Ship by Ewan Robinson, director of maritime communications and solutions provider Yangosat.
Yangosat is a maritime communications and solutions provider, helping shipowners and providers realise new systems and invigorate existing ones.

We hacked a ship.
The Owner is Liable.
Well, we hacked the communications system of the ship.
Technically we have been doing this for a few years.
This time we did it like a “bad guy” would.
We got into the vessel, belonging to a multinational company, and found out everything possible about the system, the setup, the manufacturers information.
This is a very specialised vessel that was alongside in the capitol city of a major European country, carrying out cargo discharge.
We could have broken the system so badly, the vessel would have been back to Sat-C and flag signals.
Any information going through that satcomm would have been able to be collected, checked and used.

As we are Ethical Hackers, we are obliged to act in certain ways.
One of them is that we have to tell everyone involved if we did something during testing.
We did.
Well, we tried to.
The Owners operators, when we finally managed to get someone in the overworked operations department to listen, didn’t care and ignored us.
The manufacturers didn’t even bother to respond.
All of the test was documented, peer reviewed and otherwise substantiated by trusted persons.
The lawyers are going to have a field day and be very happy.
Ship owners are not.

Owners and operators are being badly supported and advised by these super providers, who use third party engineers, or poorly trained engineers, and leave systems in an exposed state.
Equipment manufacturers and developers are so guilty of poor techniques and security that using “industry best practice” is a total contradiction.
Lawyers, P&I and Class are going to be so busy refusing claims in the event of a cyber incident, that the poor owners are not going to know where to turn.
Owners are forced into accepting sub-standard equipment.
This equipment cannot be made secure in its current format, and yet the manufacturers and developers, fail to update and secure them.
The providers supply this equipment, along with the bandwidth and engineers who install them, and then incorrectly configure and allow public access to them.
The Owner is still liable.

So how were they failed?
We have been presenting at various conferences over the last few years, highlighting how exposed we are as an industry to ‘hackers’ and bad actors.
It normally consisted of a prepared victim vessel, using a system that had been poorly configured by the provider, or the providers appointed/trained engineer, and accessing the equipment onboard, normally the antenna or satcomm system.
It’s a quick way to display to an audience just how much we are ‘displaying publicly’.
recently someone asked “what could someone actually do?”
A relevant question we thought, so we tested to see what we could actually do.
As a basic attack, an intruder could lock out all the users from accessing the equipment.
They could turn off the satcom, or prevent systems and users onboard gaining access to the internet or to systems onshore or stop onshore reaching the vessel.
OK, so this is annoying and disruptive, costing from a few hundreds to several tens or hundreds  of thousands if the charterer deems “off hire” status due to lack of communications.
Well, that’s quite expensive, potentially.

Live map of "hacked" shipping vessels VSAT systems (2017)
Some large shipping vessels are equipped with profoundly insecure VSAT systems, allowing crewmembers to send and receive messages and access the Internet during voyages and could allow an attacker to gain access, and disrupt communications.

The researcher who found the vulnerability computed a publicly available map of the vulnerable vessels on shodan...

But what can we learn from the systems we can get at?
A lot.
Given the amount of systems that are exposed to the internet, with poor configuration, it is relatively easy to find a ‘victim’, and to maximise the information gained by using the tools available and exposed by the simplest of mistakes.
Default admin passwords.
There is a need for it, but no excuse for it.
Service Providers, who manage several thousands of vessels, still use engineers who leave default admin usernames and passwords.
So, it’s a fault on one vessel, but it cant really hurt can it?
It can.
And it does.

Our target vessel was found.
That took 7 minutes to locate.
It belonged to a very large multinational corporation.
The default username and password was still in effect on the VSAT system.
Access was made to the administration area, so all usernames and passwords could be changed.
Also available was access to the system by FTP.
Even if this had not already been enabled, as we were in the Admin area, we could have enabled it.
This is where major security flaw #1 was found.
The FTP access gave access to the entire operating system of the device, not just the FTP area.
Major security flaw #2 was putting a text file in every folder with a map of the entire structure of the operating system.
This allowed for finding and copying the ‘hidden’ password file to our local machine.
It was actually encrypted.
2 hours later, it wasn’t.
So now we had all the manufacturers usernames and passwords.
Now we can access the publicly available machines where they have changed the default admin username and password, by using the manufacturers.
They have these so the engineers can always get in.
Great for business and support, not so for security.
The network connections listed in the antenna setup were then investigated.
The VSAT Modem was accessed, again using default connections on SSH, with publicly available usernames and passwords.
Command line access to the modem was achieved, allowing us to take control and alter the configuration.
In effect we could now control the communications in 2 different places.

Such systemic failures, at the developmental and operational level, are going to have huge issues when Cyber 2021 comes into force next year.
Class and P&I will be left wondering who to refuse claims and who to sue for negligence when there are events, while the operators are trusting the providers to implement correctly, and the manufacturers and developers are failing at such basic levels, they will likely be left with the legal responsibility in the first instance.
The lesson of life in todays marine communications environment?
Don’t trust what’s being given to you.
Unless you have had your own trusted IT check what’s gone before, why would you blindly trust a stranger with your vessels now?
The Owner is Liable.

Links :

• YouTube : Ship Hacking Data on the Open Seas (Brian Olson) / Pentesting Cruise Ships OR Hacking the High Seas (Chad M. Dewey)  / Hacking Closed Networks (Ira Winkler)
• TheNextWeb : Welp, even ships are hackable now
• GeoGarage blog : Researcher: not hard for a hacker to capsize ..  / Ships infected with ransomware, USB malware, worms / Superyacht cybercrime: the next big thing? / Hacking, tracking, stealing and sinking ships / Cyber Security at sea: the real threats / Hacked at Sea: Concerns grow over lax ... / Nightmare scenario: ship critical systems easy target ... / Your ship has probably been cyber attacked / Hacked at sea: Researchers find ships' data ... / Combatting maritime cyber security threats 

Why Dubai's man-made islands are still empty

Almost twenty years ago, Dubai's islands were advertised
as some of the largest man-made island development projects in the world.

What went wrong?

Tāura

Tāura is a polynesian legend.

Tāura are animals, plants and minerals that are "allied" with humans, families, clans.

They are considered fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters.

The relationship with them is fraternal and respectful.
The last long shot was certainely one of the dive I've ever done.

I was so grateful to spend so much time with the mother and her baby.
I choosed this letterbox cause it has a "vintage" look and it reminds me some really good memories. It also has the aspect (like a POV) of what I see with my mask during the dive.

"ISANG MILYON" means one million in Filipino.

I clearly dont' know how many fishes I saw but maybe more than a million !
Some shots I took during incredible dives last year.

It was the first time I saw a sardine run.

This is how I tried to transpose what I felt in this edit.

The dynamic song really helped me to edit this insanity.
I chose the black and white grading to accentuate the graphic side and the movements of the shoal.

- Tom Peyrat -

Armel Tripon IMOCA : first trail at sea with foils

Twenty knots and more, heavy seas between Belle Ile and Hoëdic, sunshine and good gusts to test the most radical and atypical IMOCA monohull in the next Vendée Globe fleet: 

narrow and with a rounded bow, will be the only "scow" in the VG

L'Occitane in Provence was able to gauge herself even if these (muscular) outings remained "confined" to a solitary appetizer, while awaiting the first collective rendezvous on 4th July for the Vendée-Arctic at the start and finish in Les Sables-d'Olonne...

Crédit vidéo : J-T. Debord et P. Bouras – L’Occitane en Provence

'The human fingerprint is everywhere': Met Office's alarming warning on climate

Scientists at the Hadley Centre, which has been on the global frontline of climate monitoring, research and modelling since 1990, say their early theories have been proven by facts.

Photograph: Hadley Centre

From The Guardian by Jonathan Watts

Exclusively compiled data from the Hadley Centre’s supercomputer shows alarming climate trajectory

The human fingerprint on the climate is now unmistakable and will become increasingly evident over the coming decades, the UK Met Office has confirmed after 30 years of pioneering study.

Since the 1990s, global temperatures have warmed by half a degree, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by almost 2 million km2, sea-levels have risen by about 10cm and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 60 parts per million (17%), according to figures exclusively compiled for the Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate science and services.

The data highlights how a young generation has grown up in a climate unprecedented in a millennium.
Future projections suggest that by mid-century a 60-year-old Briton is likely to be living in a climate 1.2C warmer than when they were born.

Scientists at the Hadley Centre, which has been on the global frontline of climate monitoring, research and modelling since it opened in 1990, said early theories about fossil-fuel disruption have been proven by subsequent facts.
“The climate now is completely different from what we had 30 years ago.
It is completely outside the bounds of possibility in natural variation,” said Peter Stott, a professor and expert on climate attribution science at the centre.

In the Hadley Centre’s early projections, he said, scientists forecast 0.5C of warming in the UK between 1990 and 2020 as a result of emissions from oil, gas and coal: “We got it spot on.”

With new heat records being broken with increasing frequency, he said global temperatures were now above any level in the Met Office measurements since 1850, or indirectly calculated through tree rings going back thousands of years.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are also higher than anything seen in million-year-old ice cores.
“We are seeing an unprecedented climate,” Stott said.
“The human fingerprint is everywhere.”

The impact was less obvious in 1990, when the centre opened in conjunction with the publication of the first report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - both were overseen by the UK scientist John Houghton, who died earlier this year.

 Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020.

Observed figure for 2019 not yet available.

Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

At the inauguration, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, said the UK needed a world-leading climate centre to assess the “serious consequences” of greenhouse gas emissions.
“What it predicts will affect our daily lives. Governments and international organisations in every part of the world are going to have to sit up and take notice and respond,” she said.

Thatcher, who studied science at Oxford, needed little convincing, but she had to overcome a sceptical cabinet.
Atmospheric physicists had been warning oil companies and policymakers about the dangers of fossil fuels for decades, but the “greenhouse effect” was still a relatively novel concern for the broader public.
Nobody felt a change.
The world had already warmed by about half a degree from pre-industrial levels, but this was low enough to be within natural variation.

Few people knew the difference between short-term “weather” and the “climate”, which is usually measured over a much longer period of 30 years.

Back then, there was also considerable scepticism about the ability of meteorologists to forecast change, even on a daily basis.
Memories were fresh of the BBC weatherman Michael Fish infamously reassuring viewers that fears of a hurricane were unfounded, just hours before the fiercest storm in generations hit the UK.

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020.

Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

“It was unglamorous” recalls James Murphy, a science fellow who was posted to the Hadley Centre from the beginning.
“But the mood in the first decade was one of great excitement, because it was a chance to do a lot of pioneering research in a growing field.”
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As acceptance and importance grew, so did scepticism.
Critics, often funded by oil firms, pushed back against climate science because they did not like its political and economic implications.
Ahead of the climate summits in Kyoto (1997) and Copenhagen (2009), fossil fuel companies funded misinformation campaigns to cast doubt on climate models.

The Hadley Centre remained focused on science.
Researchers expanded and refined their models by incorporating new knowledge on biological carbon cycles and the likely impact of fossil fuels not only on temperature, but on Arctic ice, sea-level rise, flooding, storms, droughts and other atmospheric phenomena.

Supercomputer advances enabled much greater precision.
Early models mapped the impact on grid cells of 300km on each side.
Today that is down to 2.2km, which allows detailed predictions of which stretches of river basins and coastlines will need the most protection.

Researchers are discovering the impacts go far beyond the initial focus on average temperature.
Heat records are being set with increasing frequency.
Rainfall patterns are noticeably shifting beyond natural variation.
Arctic ice is shrinking faster than expected.
The rising seas have already left some places, such as Fairbourne in Wales, below spring-tide levels.

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020.

Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

By 2050 – the year the UK plans to achieve carbon neutrality – the direct impact on Britain will be moderated by the surrounding ocean and there may be opportunities to plant new crops, but these benefits will be dwarfed by trade disruption, migration, humanitarian disasters and shifting ecosystems.

“Overall it’s bad. The negatives outweigh the positives,” said Richard Betts, a Met Office scientist who is leading scientific analysis for the next UK climate change risk assessment.
“It stands to reason that if the world keeps gets hotter and hotter, sooner or later we’ll reach the point where it is first uncomfortable and then hard to function. This won’t be seen in the UK, but in parts of the world that are already hot and humid it could increasingly get too hot to function.”

The Hadley supercomputer calculates myriad possible pathways depending on how much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere.
The good news is that the worst-emissions scenario, known as RCP 8.5, is considered less likely than before because the global coal industry has not grown as feared.
The bad news is current emissions trends (which lie between the RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 pathways) could take the planet to 2C warmer than pre-industrial levels by mid-century, which will increase storm damage, heatwaves, sea-level rise and the already great risk that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer.

The climate trends are based on multiple-year averages rather than year-on-year comparisons, which are more subject to natural variation.

Even the current best-case scenario – RCP 2.6, which is roughly in line with the Paris agreement – would leave the world hotter than today.
“What stands out is that even in the lowest current scenario, we get warming.
We’ll need to prepare and adapt,” says Jason Lowe, the head of climate services at Hadley.
He predicts extreme summer heatwaves, such as those seen in 2018, will become the norm rather than an exception.

Guardian graphic. Source: Met Office 2020. *2019 figure for observed temperature is provisional. Full source notes are included at the end of the article.

“As a scientist, I want to narrow the uncertainty so the information is as good as possible so we can plan. I think of the generations to come. I have a nine-year-old daughter.
I find myself wondering which of these pathways we will be on when she is 80 or 90.”

More extreme results are possible at both ends of the spectrum.
The next set of climate assessments will introduce a more ambitious best-case scenario (RCP 1.9) that would mean a faster transition to zero-carbon energy and a greater chance of holding temperature rises below 1.5C.
But the situation could worsen rapidly if the climate hits tipping points, such as the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet.

“There are still dangers out there that we don’t fully understand,” said Stott.
“Much of the uncertainty lies on the bad side. It could be terrifying. Can we grow enough crops to feed the population? Can we cope if some places are battered by storm after storm?”

Such concerns explain why the anniversary cannot be entirely triumphant.
Despite growing evidence of climate risks, governments have been slow to act.
Apart from downward blips such as the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus lockdown, emissions have steadily increased.
The Hadley Centre’s work now is not only about predicting impacts, but preparing for them.

“Reality has proven that what we were saying 20 to 30 years ago was right. As scientists, that is vindication. But on a personal level, I hoped we would track a different emissions trajectory from where we are now,” Stott said.

“The worry is that we are now taking risks globally that we don’t fully understand ...
there will be no winners of climate change if we continue. Scientific evidence has been around for a while. It is time it was taken seriously.”

Data source notes
Observed September Arctic sea ice extent from HadISST.2.2.0.0 (selected as single source from Met Office climate dashboard.) Emission scenarios are the mean averages for climate scenarios SSP1-2.6 (low), SSP2-4.5 (medium-low) and SSP5-8.5 (high).
Observed changes in global mean sea level (GMSL) in metres from Nasa satellite data relative to 1981-2000 average.
Emissions scenarios are 50th percentile projections from UKCP18 estimates, RCP2.6 (low), RCP4.5 (medium-low), and RCP8.5 (high).
Observed annual global temperature data from HadCRUT4.
Emissions scenarios as above.
Annual temperature for the UK based on HadUK-Grid observations.
Emissions scenarios as above.
All hindcast data omitted.

Links :

• Gizmodo : Ancient Antarctic Ice Sheet Loss Dwarfs Modern Melting, Study Finds