Improving Cyber Situational Awareness in Maritime Surveillance

Abstract

Maritime surveillance has become one of the main areas in managing overall situational awareness. For example, the growing importance of maritime traffic in cross-border trade has created new pressures to develop new technologies for accident prevention. Maritime safety is also a matter of concern for continuity management. Automatic ship alarm systems,coastal radars and coastal cameras are not alone sufficient equipment to build maritime awareness. The Universal Shipborne Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a ship transponder system that is currently used by most actors in the commercial shipping industry. Ships equipped with an AIS transponder send out a packet every few seconds with data about the ship and its journey. The transponder transmits and receives information on VHF channels. This globally used tracking system is highly vulnerable to hacking. A major maritime traffic problem arises if transponders are switched off. Hybrid threats need coordinated hybrid responses; therefore, a cyber situational picture is also needed. The cyber dimension is an essential part of the management of situational awareness. This study was conducted on the ground by visiting four situation and command centers of the Public Protection and Disaster Relief services located in Southwestern Finland. The main results can be summarized so that the failure to use ship transponders affects misuse of the authorities’ technical and physical resources. Also, the lack of real time data from ships with limited data transmission capacity affects the correct formation of the common situational picture—for example, from the site of an accident. The technical communication solutions of the PPDR authorities should be more standardized and management should be more centralized. A hybrid emergency model with emergency response functions is necessary. Currently, the flow of real time data is not being transmitted, for example, from cruise ships to the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre. The developed Hybrid Emergency Response model is a unique concept that can be transferred to the maritime environment. By using the OSINT (Open Source INTelligence) process in the hybrid emergency model, it is possible to gather meaningful intelligence data related to maritime security. Essential open source information has geospatial dimensions. The main purpose of the study is to enhance maritime safety and create a common intelligent maritime emergency management system for public safety organizations.