Telematics & Cybersecurity: How to Protect Your Fleet
By Carolina Ruiz • Published December 13, 2022 • 4 minute read
No business is 100% safe from cyberattacks, but transportation companies have traditionally been more vulnerable than those in other industries. On average, it takes transportation companies 192 days to detect a breach and another 60 days to contain it, according to research by IBM.
Cybersecurity was the focus at a recent NMFTA Cybersecurity Digital Solutions Conference, where an episode of The Freight Coach Morning Show podcast was recorded. Randy Clayton, Divisional Vice President of Engineering at SkyBitz, and Debbie Sparks, Executive Director of the National Motor Freight Traffic Association, Inc., sat down with podcast host Chris Jolly to talk about cybersecurity and digital solutions for fleets.
Here are three key takeaways from their conversations.
Combating Cyber-Threats
1. Protecting against cyberattacks starts with understanding your vulnerabilities (of which there are many).
“You’ve got to look at everything that you’re instrumenting on a trailer and everything that it communicates to as a potential attack vector, and you have to protect each one of them,” Clayton told Jolly. “We’re constantly reviewing absolutely everything. We have enormous amounts of data that we get about where the data is flowing. We can determine anomalies and patterns within that data to see if it is someone that’s actually doing nefarious activity.”
2. Know where your data is, where it’s going, and who has access to it.
“One of the really strong key things that a fleet of any size could do is know where your data is and know your points of ingress and egress of that data,” Clayton noted. “Don’t just trust that your IT guy has it or a third party has taken care of that for you. Know where it is, and make sure that you’re doing the necessary steps to protect that.”
3. Learn from threats and breaches, and continuously work to shore up your vulnerabilities.
“Information on attacks is extremely valuable to both us and everyone else,” Clayton pointed out. “So, when there is any kind of [cyber] event at an organization, it has to be addressed right away. Cybersecurity upgrades are a necessary part of operating infrastructure like this. It’s something that we do, and it’s something that we also talk to our customers about.”
Improving Digital Solutions for All Fleets
The digital threat to fleets is very real and something that must be taken seriously. For more information about cybersecurity, telematics role in protecting your fleet, and what the NMFTA is doing to help, view the full podcast here. Or reach out to SkyBitz directly.
