This blog is speculative as there is little public information about what caused the Ever Given to run aground in the Suez Canal. I find it curious that a newer ship could have had the technical problems (which could have been caused by a cyberattack) at just the time the ship could entirely block the Suez Canal. Cyber threats provide the ultimate deniability in modern warfare. Specifically, cyberattacks that could have caused the Ever Given incident have already occurred. The ability to stop navigation in a shipping channel using a civilian ship can be a new approach to compromising economic and military capabilities. In 2017, there were a series of crashes at sea with US Navy ships and civilian ships. The collisions were blamed on the Navy ships rather than having cyber investigations of the civilian ships to determine if they were the actual cause of the collisions. The Ever Given and other infrastructure incidents should require a protocol for performing control system cyber forensics consisting of both network and engineering forensics.
