Cosco hacked again

Cosco Shipping, the world’s third largest containerline, is urgently trying to fix another hacking issue that has ripped through many of its staff’s email systems over the weekend.

A Brazilian hacker who goes by the name of L0RDBR hacked into Cosco’s email system on Saturday. When contacted by Splash, a source at Cosco’s IT centre confirmed today that the email system had been attacked and it was still being fixed. No timeline for how long it would take to resolve was given.

All of the world’s top containerlines have been hacked in recent years. In July 2018, Cosco’s staff across the Americas resorted to using Yahoo email addresses and social media to keep in touch with clients as the state-owned Chinese carrier grappled to get operations on track following a ransomware attack. Though banned in China, sites such as Facebook and Twitter became vital client communication tools for Cosco’s American staff during that attack. The 2018 cyber attack is believed to have started at a customer service centre in Long Beach and spread across Cosco’s US network and then the entire Americas region.

Shipping as a whole has been warned of a heightened threat of cyber attacks in recent days following a hack of Microsoft’s Outlook email program.

While Microsoft released a patch last week to shore up flaws in its email software, the remedy still leaves open a so-called back door that can allow access to compromised servers and perpetuating further attacks by others.