In November 2023, DP World Australia, which manages approximately 40% of the country’s total goods flow, experienced a cyberattack that began with unauthorized access to its corporate network through an unpatched security system.

Upon detection, DP World proactively disconnected the corporate network from the internet to contain the incident. This forced the shutdown of container terminals across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Fremantle for three days, stranding roughly 30,000 shipping containers and incurring millions of dollars in losses.

The attack demonstrated the crippling dependency of port OT operations on functioning corporate IT/logistics systems.

The failure was the inability of the ports’ OT systems to run autonomously when the corporate IT network was compromised and taken offline.

BlastWave’s architecture enforces a stringent logical air gap, ensuring the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are not visible to the corporate network. The OT environment, protected by cloaked Gateways, would remain fully operational and segmented, allowing local operators to continue processing containers manually or using hardened local systems, preventing the need for a total operational shutdown solely due to the corporate network collapse.