Attacks on Logistics Are up Tenfold Since 2021

Research projects that cyberattacks on logistics companies will double in 2026, following several years of steep growth — a rise of roughly 1,000% since 2021. Analysts note that a single incident at a major port or carrier can cascade across ocean, air, rail and road networks.

Freight ran on paper, fax and telephone well into the last decade. The move to electronic manifests, port community systems, automated terminals and API-integrated booking happened quickly and under competitive pressure.

Rapid digitisation without a corresponding security function is a reliable predictor of exactly this curve. The systems arrived faster than the people who would defend them.

Logistics is a network of handoffs. A container is booked, trucked, loaded, shipped, discharged, cleared and delivered, and each stage depends on data arriving correctly from the last.

A terminal operating system that stops does not merely halt that terminal. Vessels queue, containers occupy yard space that incoming cargo needs, trucking appointments miss, and the disruption expands geographically for days after the systems come back.

This desk filed a port that ran on clipboards for nine days in the Ransomware section. That fallback exists because the people who did the job manually are still employed.

It is a wasting asset. Each automation programme reduces the number of staff who have ever run the process without a system, and no organisation tracks that as a resilience metric — although, on the evidence of this year, it is one of the few that reliably predicts how bad an outage gets.