COSCO Shipping Cyber Attack Isolated to Americas Region

The Port of Long Beach’s Pier J is operated by Pacific Container Terminal

China’s COSCO Shipping says it has isolated the cyber attack that impacted its local email and telephone networks in the America’s region.

As of today, all networks in other regions had been restored and business has returned to normal.

COSCO said in an update Thursday that it was continuing to investigate and fix the network problems in the Americas and it expected its systems to come back online gradually.

The suspected ransomware attack is started at COSCO Shipping’s Pier J terminal at the Port of Long Beach earlier this week. Once COSCO detected the attack, it shut down connections to its global networks as a precaution as it investigated the incident.

With the exception of the Americas, network applications in all other regions were restored at 16:00 (Beijing time) on July 25, according to the update.

The cyber attack did impact vessel operations.

The Port of Long Beach says it is monitoring developments and remains in contact with the COSCO Shipping, the terminal operator, and other stakeholders. Since the terminal’s computer system is independent of COSCO’s network, terminal operations never unaffected and cargo continues to flow smoothly through Pier J.

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