An LNG tanker abandoned its Italian terminal after cargo monitoring failed

A master whose cargo panel has stopped reporting needs one thing before anything else: to know whether the tanks are still inside their parameters. Whether the screen went quiet because of a fault or an intruder is a question for shore. Captain Roberto D'Arrigo of the Italian Coast Guard said his service assisted after the master reported "a malfunction in the systems used to monitor cargo parameters" and asked for the company's own technicians to be brought in ^[9]. The cause could not be determined ^[10]. The Chioggia unit "intervened solely for navigation safety reasons", D'Arrigo said, and sent an urgent notice asking other vessels to stay away ^[11].

Two accounts sit on top of each other. The crew called it a suspected cyberattack ^[2], and Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is not public, reported that the failure happened as the ship sailed east through the Mediterranean and into the Adriatic in early September ^[3]. Kongsberg Maritime supplied the vessel's positioning, navigation and propulsion machinery ^[12]. Its spokesman Jon Berge said it was "too early to draw conclusions as to the cause or any possible security implications" ^[13].

The diversion did not wait for either account. The ship held off the Italian coast without discharging, then on Wednesday gave up on the Adriatic LNG terminal near Rovigo and steered west for Algeciras; shipping data compiled by Bloomberg puts it near Tunisia ^[4]. Cameron LNG in Louisiana loaded the cargo ^[5]. The vessel belongs to H-Line Shipping of South Korea, is registered in Liberia and is on a long-term time charter with Vitol, which did not comment further ^[6].

The crew reported the incident early last week to Korean Register, the classification society that advises the ship on technical and safety issues, and that investigation is still running ^[7]. The turn west therefore came after the class society was notified and before anyone established what broke ^[2]. H-Line and Korean Register have not responded to Bloomberg's requests for comment ^[8].

This is the third such incident in roughly a month ^[14]. In late August the US Coast Guard and the FBI boarded two tankers off the American coast over possible cyberattacks, and American authorities are watching nearly 20 ships worldwide for similar threats ^[15][16]. Of the three, the cargo is identified for one: the two boarded in August are described only as tankers ^[1]. The underlying condition predates all of it, since shipping has been an easy target for years because onboard systems are outdated ^[17].

For anyone running instrumented equipment far from its support team, the split worth drawing is between whether you can still command a system and whether you can trust what it reports. Lost control is the rehearsed case, with procedures and a named person who calls it. The harder quadrant is intact control with instrumentation you cannot trust, which is where this ship sat: able to steer, unable to verify its cargo. The default there should be the one the master chose, which is to treat unverified cargo readings as a reason not to discharge. That default costs a voyage when the fault turns out to be a bad sensor. The other option is discharging LNG on cargo readings the crew cannot verify.

Nobody involved has explained why the gas that left Louisiana for a European terminal in the weeks before winter is now heading back the way it came ^[18].