Quotes, Snatched Baby Edition
"My other bumper sticker's a billboard."
-- Lee Rudolph, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
On a good day, about 3,000 trucks arrive at the terminal, each assigned to pick up or drop off tens of thousands of pounds of everything from diapers to avocados to tractor parts. They start that process, much like airline passengers, by checking in at the terminal’s gate, where scanners automatically read their container’s barcodes and a Maersk gate clerk talks to the truck driver via a speaker system. The driver receives a printed pass that tells them where to park so that a massive yard crane can haul their container from the truck’s chassis to a stack in the cargo yard, where it’s loaded onto a container ship and floated across an ocean-or that entire process in reverse order.
On the morning of June 27, Pablo Fernández was expecting dozens of trucks’ worth of cargo to be shipped out from Elizabeth to a port in the Middle East. Fernández is a so-called freight forwarder-a middleman whom cargo owners pay to make sure their property arrives safely at a destination halfway around the world. (Fernández is not his real name.)
At around 9 am New Jersey time, Fernández’s phone started buzzing with a succession of screaming calls from angry cargo owners. All of them had just heard from truck drivers that their vehicles were stuck outside Maersk’s Elizabeth terminal. “People were jumping up and down,” Fernández says. “They couldn’t get their containers in and out of the gate.”
That gate, a choke point to Maersk’s entire New Jersey terminal operation, was dead. The gate clerks had gone silent.
Soon, hundreds of 18-wheelers were backed up in a line that stretched for miles outside the terminal. One employee at another company’s nearby terminal at the same New Jersey port watched the trucks collect, bumper to bumper, farther than he could see. He’d seen gate systems go down for stretches of 15 minutes or half an hour before. But after a few hours, still with no word from Maersk, the Port Authority put out an alert that the company’s Elizabeth terminal would be closed for the rest of the day. “That’s when we started to realize,” the nearby terminal’s staffer remembers, “this was an attack.” Police began to approach drivers in their cabs, telling them to turn their massive loads around and clear out.
-- Andy Greenberg, "The Untold Story of NotPetya, The Most Devastating Cyberattack in History," Wired
-- Lee Rudolph, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
On a good day, about 3,000 trucks arrive at the terminal, each assigned to pick up or drop off tens of thousands of pounds of everything from diapers to avocados to tractor parts. They start that process, much like airline passengers, by checking in at the terminal’s gate, where scanners automatically read their container’s barcodes and a Maersk gate clerk talks to the truck driver via a speaker system. The driver receives a printed pass that tells them where to park so that a massive yard crane can haul their container from the truck’s chassis to a stack in the cargo yard, where it’s loaded onto a container ship and floated across an ocean-or that entire process in reverse order.
On the morning of June 27, Pablo Fernández was expecting dozens of trucks’ worth of cargo to be shipped out from Elizabeth to a port in the Middle East. Fernández is a so-called freight forwarder-a middleman whom cargo owners pay to make sure their property arrives safely at a destination halfway around the world. (Fernández is not his real name.)
At around 9 am New Jersey time, Fernández’s phone started buzzing with a succession of screaming calls from angry cargo owners. All of them had just heard from truck drivers that their vehicles were stuck outside Maersk’s Elizabeth terminal. “People were jumping up and down,” Fernández says. “They couldn’t get their containers in and out of the gate.”
That gate, a choke point to Maersk’s entire New Jersey terminal operation, was dead. The gate clerks had gone silent.
Soon, hundreds of 18-wheelers were backed up in a line that stretched for miles outside the terminal. One employee at another company’s nearby terminal at the same New Jersey port watched the trucks collect, bumper to bumper, farther than he could see. He’d seen gate systems go down for stretches of 15 minutes or half an hour before. But after a few hours, still with no word from Maersk, the Port Authority put out an alert that the company’s Elizabeth terminal would be closed for the rest of the day. “That’s when we started to realize,” the nearby terminal’s staffer remembers, “this was an attack.” Police began to approach drivers in their cabs, telling them to turn their massive loads around and clear out.
-- Andy Greenberg, "The Untold Story of NotPetya, The Most Devastating Cyberattack in History," Wired