One single cyber attack has the potential to cost major Asia-Pacific ports upwards of $110 billion in damages, a figure that is equivalent to half of total losses incurred from global natural disasters last year. This can occur in an “extreme” scenario during which a virus infects 15 major ports across Singapore, China, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia.
The warning came from insurance services provider Lloyd’s, which added that 92% of economic costs from such attacks remained uninsured and creating a gap of $101 billion. These findings were released in a report generated by the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, in partnership with Lloyd’s and on behalf of the Cyber Risk Management (CyRiM) project, a research initiative led by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University’s Insurance Risk and Finance Centre.
In a potential attack scenario targeting ships, the study posed, a software virus could scramble the cargo database logs at major ports and result in critical disruption. While this might directly impact ports in this region, it noted…
