When Amit Basu, CIO and CISO at International Seaways, sat down with AI-360 last December, the Strait of Hormuz was open. What he described, however, reads today like a briefing document for the crisis now unfolding.
Since late February 2026, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has formally closed the strait, threatening any vessel attempting transit. At least five crew members have been killed across multiple vessel attacks in and around the waterway. Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, and CMA CGM have all suspended operations, rerouting vessels around the Cape of Good Hope.
Basu predicted none of this specifically. He didn't need to. He described the conditions that make it catastrophic.
In the December interview, he told AI-360 that maritime cybersecurity is categorically different from enterprise security because the consequences of a breach are physical, not just operational. "A cyber incident can affect the ship's navigational equipment, the propulsion, or it can impact the cargo. And even more critically, it can involve crew safety." When you can't shut a ship down in the middle of the ocean, every assumption about incident response breaks.
He was particularly pointed about GPS spoofing — a threat now actively materialising. GPS jamming affected more than 1,650 ships in the Middle East Gulf on 7 March alone, a 55% increase week-on-week, erroneously placing vessels across land and sea. Basu had drawn the analogy plainly in December: someone spoofing your GPS on a road is dangerous, but you can still read the signs. "In the middle of the ocean, I have no such way to find out if my GPS is spoofed and I'm guided to a wrong location."
He also flagged nation-state actors targeting energy transportation as his sharpest concern — the threat that keeps him awake, he said, because it arrives slowly and sits undetected. The current crisis has demonstrated precisely how a single state actor can hold critical shipping lanes hostage at relatively low cost.
None of this is hindsight. It was said in December, on camera, by a practitioner with 30 years in maritime IT.
The full interview — covering edge computing at sea, deepfake threats to crew, AI-driven fraud, and the personal legal liability now facing CISOs — is on the AI-360 BrightTalk channel:https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/21039/659396