Telecommunications company Verizon is stepping up its efforts to stop not only software piracy, but also piracy in real life. Verizon has announced that it was able to save a shipping company from pirates trying to hack the latter's content management system in order to acquire confidential information regarding schedules and specific cargos aboard a specific ship.

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According to Verizon's Data Breach Digest, real life pirates are now employing a high tech approach to attack shipping companies. Instead of boarding a ship, holding the ship's crews and searching through the cargo or waiting for the company to pay a ransom, pirates are using a more sophisticated strategy.

Reports indicate that pirate attacks are more organized now as it appears that they head directly to certain cargos instead of just opening a ship's cargo randomly.

"It became apparent to the shipping company that the pirates had specific knowledge of the contents of each of the shipping crates being moved," the reports said.

Further investigation revealed that pirates have been able to penetrate the in-house content management system of some shipping lines. Verizon studied the network where the content management system operates and found out that a malicious Web shell was uploaded into the server with intentions of providing the pirates classified shipment information.

While the pirates' strategy worked a few times, it appears that they were not especially skilled hackers. One mistake, considered an error amateur by security experts, was that they failed to enable SSL on the Web shell. This means that all of their commands sent through the Internet were in the form of plain text. Through this minor mistake, Verizon was able to write a code and extract all those commands from the captured data.

According to ZDnet, the pirates also connected directly from a home computer instead of using a proxy server. Verizon was able to block the pirates' IP address, reset passwords and fix the affected servers.

Verizon said that its RISK team regularly performs cyber-security investigations in order to help commercial enterprises and government agencies around the world.

TagsPirates, Piracy, sea pirates, verizon, Verizon news, real life pirates, Pirates, hackers