The systems breakdown affecting Cosco Shipping Lines’ US operations has spread to other regions.
A cyber-attack is being blamed for the collapse of US email and some website operations. The attack first emerged on Tuesday and at the time it appeared to be localised .
However, in a customer advisory on Thursday, the company said areas affected by the network failures now included Canada, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Uruguay.
The company’s websites in those countries remained down at the time of reporting. Meanwhile, the sites in the UK and Turkey also appeared to be experiencing issues, raising concerns about an escalation of the IT problems.
In response to a question from Lloyd’s List, CSL said each region was isolated from the global Shanghai server after the breakdown in the Americas.
“After confirmation that all was secure yesterday afternoon, each region is being reconnected and operations are resuming phase by phase,” the company said.
But one UK-based freight forwarders told Lloyd's List Cosco UK had advised that it had a system outage in the UK on Wednesday and that its website had been taken down from China overnight.
In a separate statement today, CSL said it had taken proactive measures to isolate internal networks to carry out technical inspections on a global scale. But it added that its network applications outside the Americas were recovered on Wednesday afternoon after getting a security clearance from the technical experts.
“As of now, all the business operations have been back to normal in the regions with network recovered.”
As for the Americas, CSL has said it is trying its best to investigate and fix the network issues in the region. It expects the network applications to gradually get back to normal soon.
“We have started contingency plans, such as a transfer of operations and conducting operation via remote access, to ensure continuous service in the Americas. During the network failure period, there could be delays in service response in the Americas.”
Clients are being advised to submit service requests, such as bookings, instructions or amendments to bills of lading, to alternative email addresses, or via the company’s main website, which is still working properly.
However, bookings for hazardous cargo and out-of-gauge cargo were halted because of the incident.
“The vessel berthing is normal, all the vessels in our company are operating as normal as well,” the advisory added.
CSL, the liner shipping arm of state conglomerate China Cosco Shipping Group, has remained tight-lipped about the cause of the IT failure, although an internal newsletter to its staff in China said the company had been hit by a ransomware attack overseas and was conducting computer inspections.
Local media reports suggested the cyber attack broke out on Tuesday at a Port of Long Beach terminal operated by Cosco Shipping. A CSL spokesperson acknowledged there had been an attack.
Discussion about this post