Chief Executive Officer of South Africa’s logistics company, Transnet has been detailing lessons the company learnt after it was hit with a cyber-attack in July this year.
News of the attack and the subsequent halt of operations in South African Ports made the headlines on July 22, 2021 and forced the company to revert to manual operations for a while.
Portia Derby, CEO of the company explained in an interview with Eye On port during a visit to the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority that the immediate reaction of the company was to shut down its systems while steps were taken to identify the source of the attack.
She said, “we had to act fast. Sometimes you have to take the dramatic action. In our case we had to go black which means shutting down the system and that was at a cost to us as a company. But that is a smaller cost compared to if we continued to operate because we might have lost data and more.”
Portia Derby urged port operators to invest in infrastructure to safeguard their operations.
The Director-General of GPHA, Michael Luguje on his part, indicated that the Port authority has put in place several measures to ensure business continuity.
Mr. Luguje said, “with IT systems, there can never be a situation where you are perfect and impenetrable. You can only minimize the effect if attacked and be able to quickly recover if you get your systems crashed. For GPHA we have made some good strides in that regard.”