Sea pirates hacked shipping firm to find valuable cargo

A curious story hit the Internet detailing how sea pirates are now using hackers to locate high-value cargo. Softpedia details how a hacker broke into the CMS of a reputable global shipping conglomerate. The shipping firm's website used an insecure upload script, which enabled the hacker to upload a web shell that gave them full access to the firm's database. Using this access, the hacker could track down high-value cargo and shipping routes so the pirates could plan their attack:

As described in Verizon's most recent Data Breach Digest, a collection of cyber-security case studies the company's RISK Team helped investigate and solve sometime in the past year, a reputable global shipping conglomerate started having peculiar problems with sea pirates.

The shipping company was telling Verizon that pirates were boarding their vessels at regular intervals, equipped with a barcode reader (and weapons, of course), searching specific crates, emptying all the high-value cargo, and making off with the loot within minutes of launching their attacks.

All of this made the shipping company think there was something strange and hired the RISK Team to track down the source of a possible leak, which they suspected to be either an undiscovered data breach or an insider activating from within the company's headquarters.