Warship craft exploit full#
For a scarier example, an attacker could create a fake ship that had all the same details of a real vessel and make it appear like an Iranian ship full of nuclear cargo was sitting off the coast of the US. Balduzzi and Wilhoit chose a real ship, the 60 meter-long Eleanor Gordon, that was physically located in the Mississippi River in southern Missouri, but made it appear as if the ship was on a lake in Dallas. A pirate or terrorist attacker could tamper with data from an AIS service provider’s system to change the type of ship or the cargo it is carrying. They also created a ghost ship, not the kind with ghouls intent on killing passengers, but a fake kind of shipping vessel in an attack that is similar to injecting ghost airplanes into radar.
This leads to scenarios such as blocking the entrance to a harbor, causing a ship to wreck, etc.” having a stationary search and rescue coast guard helicopter ‘take off’ and travel on a set course.” Additionally, attackers can create or modify “Aid to Navigations (AToN) entries, such as buoys and lighthouses. The team of security researchers divided attacks into two categories the first exploits vulnerabilities in AIS Internet provider systems and the other exploits flaws in the AIS protocol itself.Īlthough AIS Internet providers collect AIS information and distribute it publicly, the Trend Micro blog explained, that attackers can modify “all ship details, such as position, course, cargo, flagged country, speed, name, MMSI (Mobile Maritime Service Identity) status etc.”Īttackers can “create and modify search and rescue marine aircraft such as helicopters, and light aircraft e.g. harbors and traffic control stations, and Internet tracking and visualization providers.” By 2014, it is estimated that AIS will be on one million ships. He said, “The difference between the airplane attacks and these ones is that the former are more difficult to perform, and therefore less likely to be performed by attackers in the wild.”ĪIS protocol “was designed with seemingly zero security considerations,” but is a mandatory tracking system “for all passenger ships and commercial (non-fishing) ships over 300 metric tons.” AIS works “by acquiring GPS coordinates and exchanging vessel’s position, course and information with nearby ships, offshore installations, i.e. They explained “how we have been able to hijack and perform man-in-the-middle attacks on existing vessels, take over AIS communications, tamper with the major online tracking providers and eventually fake our own yacht.” In fact, Balduzzi believes the attacks on shipping vessels are “much more feasible” than remotely attacking and hijacking an airplane. This time, security researchers placed Automated Identification System (AIS) in the crosshairs and showed that this mandatory tracking system for about 400,000 ships is “ comprehensively vulnerable to a wide range of attacks that could be easily carried out by pirates, terrorists or other attackers.”Īt the Hack in the Box conference in Malaysia, Trend Micro’s Marco Balduzzi, Kyle Wilhoit and independent researcher Alessandro Pasta presented “Hey Captain! Where’s your Ship? Attacking Vessel Tracking Systems for Fun and Profit”. Never say never to hackers as they have proven that pretty much anything can be hacked, especially when protocols are designed without any thought to security.
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