The ENISA Threat Landscape 2025 identifies transport as the second most targeted sector in the EU, behind only public administration. The UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 puts the figure for large businesses experiencing a breach or attack at 74%, with ransomware prevalence doubling year-on-year. The evidence is tangible: KNP Logistics collapsed entirely after an Akira ransomware attack in 2023. TfL had 5,000 customers’ financial details exposed. DP World Australia’s three-day shutdown created a 30,000-container backlog at four major ports.
These aren’t technology companies with dedicated security operations centres. They’re transport and logistics businesses, and security in transport carries risks that standard IT advice doesn’t fully address.
Where IT security ends and logistics cyber security gaps begin
Security in transport and logistics has traditionally meant protecting the office environment: firewalls, antivirus, email filtering, and managed backups. Those protections rarely extend with the same rigour into the operational technology that keeps goods moving. Warehouse Wi-Fi networks serving hundreds of handheld scanners, IoT sensors on cold chain and stock movement, and fleet tracking platforms feeding real-time data to dispatch – these all sit on the network, but they’re often running outdated firmware, connected on flat segments, and excluded from routine security audits.
The risk grows with every third-party integration. Your warehouse management system connects to a 3PL platform, which feeds a customs broker, which talks to a customer’s ERP. Each link in that chain is a potential entry point. On an unsegmented network, a compromise in one system gives an attacker a clear path to your domain controllers, your backups, and your most critical data. Supply chain cyber security is only as strong as the weakest connection in that chain.
The configuration gap
Across the 200+ ransomware recoveries we’ve carried out, the same pattern repeats: the organisation had a firewall, antivirus, and backups. The tools were in place, but the configuration wasn’t.
We’ve audited firewalls where a blanket “allow any to any” rule sat fourth in the list, making every rule below it redundant – at a company whose managed service provider had three weeks’ notice the audit was coming. We’ve found server estates running software patches three to four years out of date. We’ve seen logging enabled but never reviewed, so indicators of compromise went unnoticed for months. The technology was purchased, but the setup hadn’t been finished, tested, or maintained.
Why cyber insurance won’t close the gap
Cyber insurers are tightening their requirements. Many now expect demonstrable security controls as conditions of cover, and premiums are rising for organisations that can’t evidence them.
Even with cover in place, making a claim creates its own complications. Insurers typically require forensic analysis of the compromised network before any restoration begins. Your existing infrastructure is frozen as evidence. You can’t rebuild on hardware that’s being examined, and new server lead times can stretch to weeks.
Then there’s the question of whether the claim pays out at all. Discrepancies between what was declared on the policy and what forensics reveals can void cover entirely – after tens of thousands in legal and incident response costs have already been incurred. From incidents we’ve managed, organisations without cyber insurance have spent upwards of £300,000 to rebuild systems from scratch. The cost of prevention looks very different against that benchmark.
What a ransomware attack does to a logistics operation
Modern attacks don’t spread gradually. Threat actors who have already mapped your environment trigger encryption simultaneously across every system they’ve reached, typically outside working hours. Before that, they’ve already copied your data out. Transport data security, customer records, commercial contracts, employee information – all of it becomes a second pressure point: pay, or it gets published.
The order in which systems come back online reveals the depth of the dependency – layers of infrastructure that all rely on each other, and none of which can be restored until they’ve been individually scanned and verified clean. For one client, that meant working through over 800 machines one by one. Even then, restoring to a backup from before the attackers entered often means losing months of recent data.
What resilience-first looks like
Security advice for the transport sector is easy to find. Most of it is theoretical. The difference shows when advice comes from people who have actually recovered operational businesses from ransomware. They rebuilt networks under pressure, restored logistics software from compromised backups, and got warehouses dispatching again. In practice, a resilience-first approach comes down to three things: network segmentation, proper configuration, and visibility.
Segmentation means different parts of your operation are isolated from each other, so a breach in one area can’t spread across the entire network. Configuration means the controls enforcing those boundaries are actively maintained, not just installed and forgotten. Visibility means suspicious activity is caught and flagged early, before an attacker can escalate. How that’s designed depends on the environment, but the principle is consistent: contain the blast radius, detect the anomaly, respond before it spreads.
This is the approach we build into every network we recover and retain. The result across our retained client base: zero re-attacks. When a device is compromised, the blast radius stays contained to a single segment. A handful of machines, not the entire operation.
The questions your board should be asking
If you’re in a leadership role at a logistics or transport business, these are worth putting to your IT team: are your operational technology systems on separate network segments from core infrastructure? How current are your software patches across the server estate? Has anyone run a tabletop exercise of your disaster recovery plan this year: one that defines who handles communications, who verifies backups, and what gets restored first?
If your IT support for logistics operations can’t answer those questions confidently, that’s worth knowing. In cyber security, the risk lives in what hasn’t been checked. An independent security audit can surface the configuration gaps that internal teams or providers have missed. For a sector where downtime means trucks standing still, that can make the difference between a contained incident and a total shutdown.
Effective security in logistics starts with knowing where the gaps are. Download our Transport & Logistics Cyber Resilience Guide [Insert link once made] for a practical framework, or book a consultancy meeting to identify the operational blind spots specific to your business.
