The race continues to achieve high-speed, low-latency broadband internet in remote and rural locations across the globe.
Each OneWeb satellite claims to offer seamless coverage as big as Alaska, and with Starlink satellites increasing next year to have full worldwide coverage by 2023, the exciting finish line is in sight!
Unlike traditional satellites, these satellites orbit as low as 250km around the earth to attain minimal latency but high bandwidth connectivity for a fraction of the price. The angles these satellites can achieve will connect despite difficult terrain, such as mountain ranges and vast oceans. The idea of having signal in currently unconnectable places such as open oceans is why the superyacht industry is so excited.
Recent images taken from above our planet with more than 3,000 operational satellites glistening in low orbit around Earth, reminds me of looking back at the cameras whilst sailing away from Santorini, just as the sun goes down. Being an ex-chief stewardess now working in the cyber industry, both images are exciting to me.
A career in yachting was very rewarding, letting me explore untouched parts of the world, but at the cost of losing communication with family (sometimes weeks at a time) due to the restrictions placed upon us by the cost of traditional VSAT links. We would send texts to our loved ones, to say "We would be leaving port and the internet would be intermittent". Lack of internet has been a major issue for superyacht crew.
At the cost of losing communication with family
by Author
The possibility of having full coverage worldwide is a huge game changer for the yachting industry, not only helping with crew and their communications but the guest experience is also of paramount importance, with constant Internet access being a primary goal. Guests need their business updates, daily financial news and ability to stream the latest sports events. I also think of explorer vessels who will be able to share their adventures in real time with the world. It really is a positive.
However, this worldwide connectivity comes with some negatives for the yachting industry. When having this level of bandwidth available, yachts will become more vulnerable to Cyber-attacks. This is where CND can help. Our Cyber Security Operations Centre (SOC) is a fully managed service, in which our experienced analysts monitor your vessel and respond to any cyber security issues remotely. As part of this service, we also run regular vulnerability scans against the ship to ensure your network doors remain firmly locked.
Comments 2
That's exciting news. With greater power comes greater responsibility and alertness. What kind of cyber attacks do you think could be exclusive to superyatchs and other large vessels.
We do monitor superyachts for cyber attacks and they are definitely of interest to a number of threat actor categories. We see some interest from nation states, probably because of the guests/owners being world leaders.
Cyber criminals target them because if they managed to breach a superyacht, they may stand a good chance of extorting money which is in plentiful supply. Hackitivists may have an ethical objection to the yachts themselves or their owners. Hackers would want to target superyachts for the thrill and the noteriety, they would also love to get into the OT and effect the running of the ship.
We see a constant stream of known threat actors knocking at the door of the superyachts we monitor, it helps the attacker if the yachts use a maritime ISP with a known address range. Each superyacht with good Internet bandwidth can expect to see over 10,000 attacks from known threat actors per week. The advent of constellation based satellite access might make this worse, unless the IP address range is no different from that of a land based network. Then the attacker will have to work harder to find the superyachts