The post-modern pirates
A Buzzfeed article, “How pirates and hackers worked together to steal millions of dollars in diamonds”, tells the movie-like story of the boarding of a container ship in the Indian Ocean. Piracy on the high seas is, sadly, far from unusual, but the twist in this case was that the pirates knew exactly which containers they wanted, which in this case contained a cargo of diamonds.
The latter-day buccaneers were part of a gang that included hackers who were able to install a web shell in the content management system (CMS) used to store the vessel’s manifest and bills of lading. A ship’s CMS is for internal use only and is where the shipping company keeps all the information about each container, along with the GPS coordinates of the vessel at any moment. To give an idea of the scale of such operations, the average container ship can transport up to 19,000 standard size containers, each measuring 6.1 meters by 2.4 meters, by 2.6 meters, or twenty-foot equivalent units.
When container ships are attacked at sea, the crew take refuge in a secure area with food and communications, and where they can survive for around a week; pirates will sometimes take this long to go through as many containers as they can, while at the same siphoning off the vessel’s fuel, leaving it adrift in the ocean. But in this case, the whole operation was over in 90 minutes.
After repeating the operation on six other vessels, the gang had accrued several million dollars in diamonds. An investigation showed that crews were not involved, and finally, an audit revealed the web shell, finally allowing the authorities to put a stop to the gang’s activities.
Today’s post-modern pirates no longer need to storm their way aboard vessels in the hop of finding loot. Increasingly, it seems, they are able to locate a ship in real time, know exactly how to get aboard with the minimum fuss, and go straight to the containers they want. What’s more part of the gang never even takes to sea, but simply sets the operation up via a keyboard. This is a very different type of crime, one that begins with the application of sophisticated information technology, and that only requires the use of force for a brief moment at the end of a chain of well-managed events.
Modern times, on a screen near you soon.
(En español, aquí)
