Fleet-Wide Maritime OT Cybersecurity for a Leading European Dredging Operator

Fleet-wide OT cybersecurity is a different problem at sea than on land. Vessels run overlapping IP ranges by vendor design, connectivity drops in and out with the satellite link, and crews aren’t cybersecurity experts. This case study shows how a leading European dredging operator secured its entire fleet against IACS UR E26/E27 requirements — without reconfiguring a single network.

Challenges & Objectives

The operator needed to meet IACS maritime cybersecurity requirements and secure onboard OT systems against rising threats, but four realities stood in the way. Vendor restrictions meant multiple vessel systems shared identical subnet ranges, ruling out standardized IP addressing. Vessels operated with intermittent, low-bandwidth satellite connections, so any solution had to work offline. Onboard crews needed simple, clear alerts — not a SOC analyst’s dashboard. And with vessels scattered across the globe, the operator had no centralized way to see fleet-wide risk.

Proposed Solution

Radiflow deployed its full OT security portfolio, purpose-built for maritime constraints:

• iSID runs passive network monitoring and anomaly detection on every vessel, giving onboard crews a clear alerting layer that catches both known CVEs and behavioral anomalies.
• vSAP smart collectors solve the overlapping subnet problem by tagging network traffic with unique identifiers via GRE tunneling — so iSID can tell devices apart even when their IP addresses clash across segments, enabling a complete inventory regardless of L2-L4 conflicts.
• iCEN gives the shore-based SOC one unified view across every vessel in the fleet, regardless of location.
• CIARA adds risk assessment and breach-and-attack simulation, mapping potential attack paths against the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Onboard, traffic flows from the vessel OT layer through the vSAP smart collector to iSID for threat detection, then syncs over an encrypted satellite link to iCEN and CIARA on shore — autonomous when offline, synchronized when connected.

Benefits

• The only OT platform purpose-built for maritime connectivity constraints
• Solves the overlapping IP challenge without any network reconfiguration
• Operates fully offline with no cloud dependency
• IACS E26/E27 compliance built in, using the same engine as IEC 62443
• Crew playbooks enable effective response with no cybersecurity expertise required onboard

The result: full fleet OT visibility and compliance, continuous protection whether vessels are docked or in remote waters, and faster, simpler crew response when it matters.