The Impact of Human Behaviour on Cyber Security of the Maritime Systems

摘要

Nowadays,there are threats everywhere around us,on land,in the air and at sea.The most important and dangerous ones at the same time are the threats with impact on security and safety.At sea,more than in other fields,these threats are very different,starting with piracy,armed robbery and taking hostages up to different forms of terrorist or cybercrime acts.Piracy and other violent activities appear specifically in particular geographical areas,mostly based on different conflicts inside seaside countries.For the other threats considered,such as different types of terrorist activities,there are not geographical areas of interest defined.They can appear all over the world.The terrorist acts in the maritime field are not necessarily to be treated as a direct action,background systems may also be used,like information or operative computer control systems,which have a great importance and impact on the proper functionality of the maritime systems.Nowadays,there are some serious cybersecurity incidents with major impact on a worldwide scale.In the last decade there was a limited approach to address such major issues,most of them based on several methods,which had a centralized point of failure:the lack of knowledge and adaptability versus new ways of system penetration.For the technical vulnerabilities there are different solutions already developed,or being developed,for data protection and information security.Despite some important developments on data security,many of the important sectors remain under high risk regarding cybersecurity.The maritime sector today is considered one of the most exposed sectors to cyber threats,due to the global nature of the business as well as a great economical,geopolitical and environmental influence.Here,the higher vulnerability remains the human element,as an operative part of the data systems.Humans will always be a source for mistakes and errors."To err is human"can be successfully applied in many activity fields,included the maritime one.The main purpose of any study on these matters,human factor and cyber protection is to start from the unpredictability of the human behaviour.It would be almost impossible to provide a totally secure information system,as long as such a system is exposed to the human factor.This paper intends to analyse possible models of human behaviour with impact on data systems'protection in the maritime field and how systems can be improved and highly secured for any vulnerabilities based on these models.