Detecting Sophisticated Attacks in Maritime Environments using Hybrid Situational Awareness

Abstract

In recent years, the growing emergence of digitalization and data explosion has altered the threat dynamics in the maritime sector. The interconnected Maritime Critical Infrastructures are highly attracted by cybercriminals, who are constantly evolving their tactics, committing complex, sophisticated attacks causing a tremendous impact to economic and social life. Such intrusions engage multi-vector, composite attacks exploiting existing vulnerabilities from both the physical and the cyber domain. Current risk assessment approaches and countermeasure strategies fail to gather an overview of the maritime physical and cyber threat landscape. This work describes a method to detect and counter such sophisticated attacks by applying a Hybrid Situational Awareness model. This model allows to generate a holistic picture of the security condition within Maritime Critical Infrastructures considering the potential cascading effects of such combined cyberphysical attacks. Furthermore, the current work presents some illustrative examples, which show how the Hybrid Situational Awareness model can be integrated into maritime environments to detect potential future coordinated attacks and how it can facilitate the communication with first responders and emergency organizations of a city in case of a crisis.