Commercial shipping vessels have such poor cyber security it’s possible to track them down and hack into them via poorly secured communications systems. Ken Munro, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners, who has documented the lapses in security said they are “simply not acceptable”. Many of the problems stem from how ships traditionally ran on dedicated, isolated networks which didn’t connected to the outside world, meaning that network security wasn’t really an issue, so long as physical security was in place to stop outsiders actually boarding the ships to tamper with computers.