Cyber Security: Connect at Your Own Risk
Connectivity — trucking shorthand for plugging into the Internet of Things — is a positive trend being advanced by industry suppliers and embraced by forward-leaning fleets to better control operating costs and boost productivity.
It all sounds good. Until it doesn’t.
The appeal is easy enough to grasp. Connect every digital device so that data can be shared and leveraged across multiple, interconnected systems. In trucking, that means linking everything from in-cab computers to smartphones to hardware so reams of data can be intelligently managed and leveraged.
Expanding connectivity can make trucking operations smarter and nimbler and thus more profitable. But it also heightens exposure to cybersecurity threats. When everything is connected, a sophisticated criminal or merely a disgruntled ex-employee or unhappy customer can more easily gain access to computerized systems to wreak havoc on unsuspecting or poorly guarded businesses.
Ron Godine, vice president, information and cloud technology for fleet-management provider TMW Systems, points out that increased connectivity via in-cab devices gives outsiders the ability to “touch all the systems that affect the vehicle and learn your location. If they know your location, what can they do? How can they target you? There’s safety concerns with just knowing your location, where you’re going and how fast you’re going. Any of those things are a security awareness risk.”
Hackers can then gain access to a fleet’s trucking management solution and back office systems to learn about customers, loads, and financial information, cautions Godine. “What we’ve seen is that people can get into a system by automation and by hacking accounts, and then they peruse data like any other user.”
Alan Gordon, chief information officer of Cisive, parent of Driver iQ, which provides employee screening services, says that “small- and mid-sized companies can get lulled into thinking ‘Who would go after me?’ but truck fleets are just as …Read the rest of this story