Charting a Course to Cybersecurity: The Maritime Industry's Response to Growing Threats

Over the last year I have participated in quite many discussions about cyber security in maritime industry. There is a trend of growing number of cyber attacks in the industry, which have caused lots of disruptions and financial losses for companies and organizations. The shipping industry is also particularly vulnerable to these threats due to the long service lives of onboard systems, growing use of cloud-based solutions by equipment manufacturers and shipowners both in new constructions and also as additions to in-service vessels to enable remote maintenance and collection of data. Continue reading

D.. What? SPF, DKIM, and DMARC; What Exactly Are They

IT is wrought with acronyms and e-mail is no exception. In this post, I will explain how these three help battle spam and other malicious emails, that we all get every day. All of these work behind the scenes and are not visible to the end users of e-mail services, if they don’t go looking for them specifically. Some Background I have often likened e-mail to sending post cards. You write your message on a piece of hard paper, add the recipient address, sign your name, and off it goes. Continue reading

Are Finnish Companies Bleeding Edge in the Fight Against Spoofing

I took the Friday after the independence day free and apparently I didn’t have anything else to do, except to study SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These are methods for senders to provide authentication for the sent emails to aid spam filters in detecting spoof attempts, with SPF and DKIM being a little bit older and more established, and DMARC being a newer method for communicating policy, building on the foundation of the other two. Continue reading