Smart Shipping Symposium reveals Enigma of Cybersecurity
A copy of Bletchley Park’s infamous Enigma machine made a special appearance at City of Glasgow College’s international maritime symposium.
The relevance of Bletchley Park’s WWII operation to modern cyber security was one of the items for discussion at the college’s Smart Shipping Symposium which took place over two days.
Simon Thompson, McAfee Online Safety Learning Officer, at Bletchley Park and a key speaker at the symposium, said:
“Explicit parallels can be drawn between many of the mistakes made in the use of ciphers that allowed Bletchley Park's codebreakers to uncover enemy secrets, and the weaknesses surrounding the modern uses of cryptography personally, professionally, and commercially.”
Thomas Briggs, Learning Manager at Bletchley Park, added:
“We felt that the Battle of the Atlantic and the Enigma machine was a pertinent analogy for the importance of data security in modern shipping. It was great to the part of the college’s Smart Shipping Symposium, I’ve discovered a lot from listening to all the speakers and I’ll certainly be feeding what I’ve learned into my programmes at Bletchley Park.”
More than seventy years have passed since the end of Bletchley Park's operations in World War Two, but the site was arguably the birthplace of modern computing and so has relevance to the history of any discipline in which computers are used today.
Held over two days the college’s Smart Shipping Symposium brought together 23 industry-leading speakers and over 100 eminent academics, partners and delegates to debate how smart shipping can be achieved and centred on specific topics:
- The UK Government’s perspective on Smart Shipping.
- Connected ecosystems to improve safety and profitability.
- SMART technologies such as green propulsion, blockchains in transportation and the use of drones in confined spaces.