Cybersecurity 5 min
Behind the scenes with Marinus: cybersecurity
Cybercrime is on the rise and is the nightmare of almost every transport entrepreneur. Marinus Brink explains how we protect our TMS against cyberattacks.
Introduction
‘Around 250 trucks could no longer go anywhere’: the headline of a news report earlier this year. It was the result of a cyberattack with ransomware. And probably the biggest nightmare of just about every transport entrepreneur. Cybercrime is increasing and companies are increasingly expected to fight it. That is why Marinus Brink, co-founder and technical director of Filogic, explains this time how we protect our TMS against cyberattacks. Time for ‘Behind the scenes with Marinus’!
What types of cyberattacks do you encounter?
Marinus: ‘Cybercrime comes in different forms. Take phishing, for example, where you receive an email with fake information. Last week I won a million in the national lottery. To collect this amount, all I had to do was click on a link. Fortunately, as soon as I moved my mouse over the link, I saw straight away that it was an untrustworthy address. The sender’s email address also looked strange. Had I clicked on the link? Then cybercriminals could have stolen my data. Fortunately, Filogic rarely deals with phishing. With cyberattacks in the form of DDoS, however, it does. This abbreviation stands for distributed denial of service and is an attempt to make a computer, network or service difficult to reach. Hackers try this by continuously sending small messages to you from all kinds of different locations. The aim is for your platform to no longer cope and ultimately accept no visitors at all. Another type of cybercrime we regularly encounter is ransomware. With this, hackers try to hold data or systems hostage in exchange for a ransom. This happened, for example, at a large transport company, which the earlier headline is about.’
How do you protect the TMS against cybercriminals?
‘We are continuously alert to cyberattacks. We protect our TMS against ransomware by building security modules into it at various software levels. Think, for example, of smart firewalls that protect the TMS against misuse from outside. And we spot a DDoS attack early in our monitoring systems. That is when hackers try, in a very short time, to connect to our platform millions of times. Because we can see where the traffic comes from, we can temporarily block those locations. In effect we then build a kind of gate, to prevent our platform from coming to a standstill. Other ways in which we fight cybercrime are encrypting data and systems and using very strong passwords. We also keep the operating systems that run within our platform automatically and continuously up to date. We always apply the latest security standards: every night we run a security update across more than a hundred servers. This way we guarantee carriers that our TMS always runs according to the latest security requirements. Does a successful cyberattack happen after all? Then we always have a current backup on hand. And we are able to make it available within a reasonable time. In fact, within fifteen minutes we can transfer all active administration to another server or service provider. This way carriers can always work without worry.’
How secure is a TMS in the cloud?
‘When you work with a Transport Management System in the cloud, your data is even better protected. With locally installed software you are much more vulnerable. After all, if in that case you click on a link in a phishing email? Then your entire network becomes infected. With a TMS in the cloud this is impossible. In that case only the local data on your device is encrypted. All you have to do is go to our platform via another device and you can still access your secured transport data. That is why it is so important that, as a carrier, you check whether you really are working in a fully cloud-based TMS.’
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