Ships are just giant floating computers, filled with ransomware, BadUSB, and worms

[john61ct]

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/13/fl...computers.html

[ohgary]

NO different than any network, You need security and monitoring to make sure your systems are safe. System should be locked down. USB ports should be disabled, network access should be restricted. Admin access should be restricted. Be it land or see you need to protect the network since the people using it are idiots.

[iSaint]

They need to start making network stations with no USB ports. Not that hard.

[LoudMusic]

I work for an IT company that focuses on ships. We inherited a network one time where each workstation was scanned with Malwarebytes or something similar and over 3000 instances of malware were detected on each PC. One of them had over 8000. How the hell does that even happen? The computers were nearly useless. My coworker and I anticipated it being a quick in-and-out "we are now your network administrators" kind of job, but it ended up taking us more than a week just to get the PCs up to the starting point. THEN we were able to go through our usual routine. In retrospect it likely would have been faster to just format and reinstall each of them.

This primarily comes from the engineers being "tinkerers", the crew pirating software that has malware, and the IT staff (usually a lowly engineer who "likes computers") enforcing no form of security at all.

But as said before, it's no different than any other office or school network. You have to secure it and be diligent in educating your users. In particular, no user gets administrative access to their PC.

[john61ct]

A key is good backups, including standard "as just installed" drive images with the software installed and configured.

No time wasted "fixing" software issues, just low level format and reset to a known good state.

Sounds like an IT Admin type with full authority either needs to be aboard, or checking the systems on a very regular basis.

Yes lots can be done remotely, but the **non tech** parts of user supervision need to be well supported by all levels of management.