Some risks sit so deep in a vessel that nobody ashore thinks to look. They run quietly for years and earn no attention until the day they stop.

Boardrooms still tend to picture the engine room and the server room as separate worlds. A ship does not.

Executives who learn how their own vessels are wired will own the risk before it owns them.

Most of a ship’s working life runs on systems that boards rarely see.

Marlink, citing DNV’s Cyber Priority reports for 2024 and 2025, says between 70% and 80% of maritime and energy activity relies on operational technology. That covers propulsion, machinery and the equipment that keeps a vessel moving safely.

These systems are now joined to corporate networks and satellite links. An attack on them is not simply a data loss. It can disrupt equipment and endanger crew. It can also harm the marine environment. Recovery may need technical work that cannot wait for a routine maintenance window.

The industry’s weakness is ownership. Cybersecurity is still handed to IT teams, yet operational systems sit outside much of what those teams were built to protect. Legacy equipment, proprietary protocols and isolated networks make integration difficult. A software update that takes minutes ashore may need months of planning on machinery that cannot be taken offline. Ship managers running fleets of mixed ages and suppliers often lack a single clear map of what connects to what.

Regulation sets a floor. The IMO’s cyber risk management guidelines fold cybersecurity into safety management systems. IACS Unified Requirements E26 and E27 address cyber resilience for ships and onboard equipment. Compliance proves a vessel has met a standard. It does not prove anyone understands how an incident would travel through the ship.

Marlink recommends network segmentation, deliberate isolation of critical systems and dedicated IT/OT security operations centres. These steps contain intrusions and improve detection without disrupting operations.

There are three things owners can take from this.

Marlink’s own article frames the move as one from blind spot to boardroom priority. For shipowners, the next step is to establish what is connected and identify the weak points before an outage does it for them.

Most AP tools stop at approval and hand the invoice back for re-keying into a bank portal, where the data trail breaks and reconciliation turns manual. Payment is also the stage carrying the highest-value fraud risk, since bank details can change between onboarding and release.

With Marcura Procure to Pay, approved invoices consolidate into one payment run: several invoices per supplier, credit notes netted, settled in each supplier's local currency across 130+ currencies, on a single authorisation.

Payments reconcile to the originating purchase order and to the vessel carrying the cost, then post to the finance system with the audit trail attached.

» See the Procure to Pay payment workflow. «

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VENERGY Maritime is partnering with DeepSea Technologies to establish a data-driven approach to fuel efficiency, emissions and machinery monitoring as it plans to expand its tanker fleet to more than 30 newbuild vessels before 2030.