Los Angeles will spend nearly $7 million to launch a cybersecurity center with IBM focused on defending the city’s maritime supply chain, the company announced Monday.
The Port of Los Angeles entered a three-year contract with IBM to develop the center, which will extend threat monitoring for companies beyond “traditional maritime stakeholders” and into the telecommunications and cargo companies that support the port’s supply chain. The Cyber Resilience Center will collect threat intelligence from each organization and make it available at a single source, the port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, said in a press release.
“The Cyber Resilience Center will provide a cutting-edge early warning system to further defend the Port and its stakeholders against cyber threats,” Seroka said. “This will result in greater collective knowledge, enhanced data sharing throughout our Port ecosystem, and will help to maintain the flow of critical cargo.”
The center, designed to automate what would otherwise be manual threat intelligence collection, will serve as a one-stop-shop for participating supply chain companies to share their own threat indicators and attacks. The center will run on IBM’s Cloud Pak security platform and will be interoperable with security tools from other vendors.
Currently, IBM said, the port relies on individual organizations to share threat data with each other, potentially limiting how well and how quickly the port can respond to a cyberattack. Within IBM’s platform, the company said, disparate threat data can be integrated so port officials and companies can view all relevant threat data in one dashboard, then respond and restore operations quickly.
International ports are considered a high-profile target for federal cybersecurity officials, and Los Angeles maintains the busiest shipping port in North America, having facilitated $276 billion in trade last year.
