DEF CON 33 - Incident Response from a Maritime Sysadmin’s War Room - Kit Louttit, Steve Winston
Source: YouTube · DEFCONConference · published Oct 10, 2025 · 26:41
The Marine Exchange of Southern California manages critical maritime operations for Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, including vessel traffic and information services, with a strong focus on cybersecurity and operational resilience. A key concern is cyber resilience, as systems must remain stable and functional without unnecessary updates.
Key Takeaways:
• The Marine Exchange provides vessel traffic control akin to air traffic control, managing 55 terminals with real-time data for arrivals, departures, and shifts 4:01-4:44.
• The organization relies on a comprehensive cybersecurity framework, including incident response planning, risk assessment, and continuous vulnerability management 8:00-10:50.
• Internal threats are often not state-sponsored but instead involve social engineering, such as fake job offers to exploit trust and extract sensitive data 12:32-15:54.
• Critical security practices include privileged access reviews, endpoint monitoring, threat modeling, and baselining normal behavior to detect anomalies like unusual login times or command execution 20:54-23:51.
• A specific vulnerability in Palo Alto SSLVPN exposes systems to arbitrary command execution via a simple POST request with a malicious session cookie 25:08-26:32.
The Marine Exchange emphasizes that cybersecurity is not just about technology—it requires a holistic posture combining physical, technical, and administrative controls, ongoing testing, and vigilance against evolving threats.
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First 800 characters of the transcript
Good morning and welcome. I'm uh Captain Kip Ludit, executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which operates the vessel traffic service for the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Two parts uh to this brief. One, me as the executive director view, and then second, introducing Steve Winston, CEO of the company that does all of our IT and cyber security. So, here's our beautiful building on a hill in San Pedro. If you ever want to come visit, uh we are open for visits. and the bumper sticker of what we do. Safe, secure, efficient, reliable, and envir environmentally sound marine transportation. So again, two-part brief. Delighted to be here. So in terms of what we do, the Marine Exchange has two primary functions. Our maritime information service and our vessel traff…