E2: Maritime Security | Corey Ranslem, Dryad Global

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Nathan Schneider. Today I'm joined by Corey Ransom, who is the CEO of Dryad Global. Today we'll be discussing maritime security with a focus on the Middle East. Corey, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:12):

Hey, thanks Nathan. It's great to be on with you and looking forward to an engaging conversation.

Speaker 1 (00:18):

Me as well. So why don't we start by having you tell us a bit more about yourself and what you do for Dryad.

Speaker 2 (00:23):

Sure. So my background, I grew up in the Midwest here in the United States, and I joined the US Coast Guard when I was a lot younger. Spent eight years in the Coast Guard working in different maritime law enforcement operations. Did that for eight years and then since I've been working for companies that have had a focus or at least a partial footprint within the maritime industry. So I've worked for companies, it's all been along the lines of maritime security just in different forms. So the companies I've worked for, we've provided support to some of the major cargo lines, the major cruise lines, large yachts, their shoreside managers globally. And now with Dryad, what we do is we have a couple of areas of focus. We provide what we would call maritime domain intelligence and information to our clients. So it spans the whole entire industry from planning people to fleet managers to ship captains for cargo lines, the cruise lines, large yachts, and their agents and people who are working with them.
(01:37)
We provide information on global events so that they can make decisions about where they may want to go or where may have to go or make decisions that, hey, we just don't want to go into this area. So that's part of our business. And then the other piece of the maritime security services that we provide include cybersecurity services, so specifically cyber solutions to protect ships and their shoreside operations from cyber threat, which is very unique and different than how you would deploy cyber solutions onshore, say in an office building or at a university or a bank or whatever. So we're very maritime focused on what we do.

Speaker 1 (02:22):

And do you strictly just provide intelligence or do you have ships on the ground that can actually carry out the security?

Speaker 2 (02:28):

So we just strictly provide intelligence. We've got some great partners that we work with on a global basis. So if we provide an assessment to a client and we may have a recommendation that, hey, it would be a good idea to put a security team on board. There's partners that we work with in different parts of the globe that would provide the actual personnel for the shipboard. So we're really, for our clients and the global maritime industry, we're really the starting point. So people come to us first to get an idea, the situation, to kind of help them make that decision whether they want to go somewhere or not. And in some cases, for the cargo clients, they may have to go there. So we try to work with them on being able to provide the best assessment of what's happening on the ground right now so they can make the decision. Do we go into port today or do we wait a couple of days? Or how does that look based on what's happening?

Speaker 1 (03:22):

And then this information that you have, is this gathered through government sources, satellites? Where do you come up with this information?

Speaker 2 (03:29):

Sure. So we have a really good group of intelligence analysts that are scattered all over the globe. So we have a number of tools that we use. None of the information that we have and we provide to our clients would be considered classified by a government or a military. So we operate in pretty much 100% open source information. So we use social media, we use media. There's different tools that we have that we look at. There's certain government sites where we have information feeds. We do have agreements where we do work with government organizations to get information that's in the non-classified realm to be able to then provide that with our analysis as to what's happening. So the biggest part of that is the data for us is the starting point. It's the analysis of that situation that our clients really rely on. So anybody can put a dot or a line or a box on a map to say, Hey, something's happening here, or don't go into this location or stay away from here.
(04:34)
But we put the analysis as to the why does this event or situation matter or potentially not matter to you and your operations? So the intelligence analyst, the people part of it for us is extremely important because that's really what our clients rely on is our analysis. Everybody knows pretty much when you're in the maritime industry, where the attacks are taking place, where the security issues are, where potentially the migrant issues are, but we really try to put that into context for our clients as to why is this happening, what do you need to know about it? And I think that's really what's helpful when it comes to providing that analysis. In fact, we just did some analysis for a client that was really specific based on some requests they had, and they came to us specifically for the analysis piece. They're like, Hey, we kind of have an idea and know what's going on in this particular region of the world, but we need an analysis from you guys into maybe these six or seven points. So our team does a very good job, and a lot of the team members have military and government intelligence backgrounds, so they understand the process of being able to look at the raw data, the information, and then be able to put that really into that intelligent story to be able to tell our clients

Speaker 1 (05:52):

How is this information delivered? Is this via some sort of map with data points or report or?

Speaker 2 (05:58):

Sure. And that's a really great question, and it really depends on our clients. So we have a software platform called arms. It's a map-based platform, and we have a number of clients who subscribe to that platform, and that's really a self-serve platform. So all of our high level intelligence information, event tracking, you can do vessel tracking through that. There's weather in there. There's a number of pieces that are a part of this platform. So we have clients that have a login where they can go in and they can pull intelligence reports from different countries, different ports, different regions of the world with our analysis as part of that. So that's one of the ways that we provide the information. The other is we have some custom reports that we prepare specifically for clients. So a custom report would be like what we call a transit risk assessment.
(06:52)
So a client will come to us and say, Hey, we've got a vessel that's going from point A to point B. Can you give us an overview, a transit risk assessment of some of the things that we need to pay attention to or be aware of during this journey? So we'll put a custom report together and that's usually delivered to the client in a PDF form is usually the easiest way to do it. And then we also have consultation where we'll provide a report and then the client may ask us additional questions. So we can do that either via email or via a video call or regular call where we really try to be as involved with our clients as they need us to be kind of through that part of the process.Speaker 1 (07:35):

Now, if we were to transition more to the current state, of course in the Middle East with the rebels in Yemen, there's been a lot of movement developments. Can you take me back to maybe a year or two ago and what the Sue West Canal situation looked like and how that's transformed to more today?

Speaker 2 (07:51):

Sure. And it's been a really interesting transformation, Nathan, over the past year of what we've seen happen. So from just a little bit of a brief, brief history, there has been a civil war going on in Yemen probably for the better part of about 10 years now between the Houthis Rebels, the Yemeni government, and then also between really Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. So it's really kind of been an interesting dynamic. And most of what has happened over there has been back and forth. The Houthis might launch a missile into maybe a strategic area within Saudi Arabia, or the Saudis may launch into a Houthis controlled area within Yemen, or we've seen this back and forth going on for, like I said, the better part of 10 years. Even with this happening, traffic through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, through the Straits and then into the Gulf of Aiden has been fairly normal.
(08:57)
We see on average about it's estimated anywhere between about 12 to 15% of the global GDP passes through this region. It's a pretty important route to cut down the timeframe. If you're moving goods from the Mediterranean, Europe, northern Africa into Asia, it is much quicker to go through this region than it is to go around the Cape in Africa. So we didn't see a lot of issues over the past year up until recently, of problems with shipping going through this region. Every once in a while you would see some sort of suspicious approach or something happen, but the risk level has not been at the critical level that it is now. We've always assessed the risk in this region as moderate just because of the presence of the Houthis and just this being a regional conflict. But we've really never seen anything from the standpoint of shipping explode like it has.
(09:59)
Now, fast forward to basically November of last year, we saw the Houthis really step out when they hijacked a car carrier called the Galaxy Leader. That was very unusual, and the fact is we'd never seen the tactic where the Houthis actually used a helicopter to board the ship and hijack the ship. Very rarely do you see that happen from the perspective of a hijacking, the Houthis would not have been able to hijack that ship without a helicopter because car carriers, there's no real way to just climb up onto a car carrier, like there may be a cargo ship where you'd be able to throw a ladder up and then climb up the side and then get on the container deck. A car carrier is basically flat on the sides because it carries cars and they're all contained. So the only way to do that would be a helicopter.
(10:54)
So that was a really unusual situation, and once we saw the hijacking of the Galaxy leader, we started to see more activity that's devolved into missile launches and drone strikes. And that was really concentrated from, if you look at the geography, it would be about 18 north on the latitude all the way down to the Straits of Babel and Deb. And so that was where we saw the majority of the tax concentrated as we saw the us, the UK, and some other NATO military start to move ships into this region. We saw the attacks really maintain until the US and the UK have just recently now started to launch Counter Offensives on the Houthis position. So once they started to do that, and once we had a fairly good military presence in the part of the Red Sea, we've now seen the attacks shift into the Gulf of Aiden.
(11:57)
So from a geography standpoint, Yemen, there's a part of Yemen that's in the Red Sea and then basically curves down into the Gulf of Aiden. So we saw the attacks move into the Gulf of Aiden. The US and the UK have stepped up their attacks and they're offensive against the Houthis. So we're not seeing attacks by either missile strikes or drone strikes like we were almost on a daily basis. That was happening December into January. So we've seen the level of attacks decrease, but we've also seen in an increase in military presence in this region along with an increase in counter attacks into Yemen. So that kind of brings us up to where we are today. We still see suspicious approaches. We have seen attempted attacks on military vessels and civilian cargo vessels. One of the things that we have seen is a shift in maritime traffic.
(12:56)
So we've seen, typically the straits would see through the Red Sea Suez, that region of the world would typically see the movement of about 100 ships through this region per day. We've seen probably about 50 to maybe even 60% of that traffic now completely divert around the Cape around Africa to go into the Mediterranean. So that's a pretty substantial shift in traffic that's now fairly far outside of this operational region. So there's been a number of changes with the increase in security, kind of the critical level of attacks, and then the shift of global shipping to go around Africa.

Speaker 1 (13:42):

What is the end game for the Rebels when they take over a ship? Is this to apply pressure to the west? Is this to get a response? What's really their goal?

Speaker 2 (13:51):

Well, that's a really good question. So right now the Houthis have only hijacked one ship, and it's the Galaxy leader that is the only ship that they've actually gone on board to hijack. I don't know with that what their end game is. If they're planning to, I mean, if we look back in the 2008 to 2012 14 era, when the Somali pirates were active, that was a hundred percent monetary. They hijacked a ship and they asked for ransom. The ransom got paid, the ship was let go. They didn't really steal much of the cargo. They didn't really, in most cases, there were some crew members that were harmed and killed during the hijacking, but for the most part, if the ransom was paid, it was a hundred percent monetary for them. From the Houthis standpoint, I think it's more political and ideological than it is monetary. There's no ransom that's been asked for the ship. It's still sitting in a Houthis controlled port. We've heard that they have tours on board. There's been weddings on board, just really odd events associated with.

Speaker 1 (15:00):

That. It was the music video as well.

Speaker 2 (15:02):

Right? It's to be able to say, well, what is the end game? You have the ship and you've said you could hijack it, but it's the only ship that you've hijacked. The rest of what we've seen have been attacks on commercial shipping. But honestly, if you look at the majority of those attacks, they have not caused major damage. The missiles in the drone strikes have caused explosions and damage to the ship, maybe a container or two containers, but at this point, they haven't sunk a ship. We haven't seen a hijacking of it. We've seen a number of suspicious approaches, which we think are not necessarily for hijacking, but potentially for confirmation of targeting. And so it's been interesting to see ultimately, are they trying to use this to be able to flex their potential power within this region, or is it something else? At this point, it is been very disruptive to shipping, but ultimately shipping's pretty good at normalizing.
(16:02)
So if this becomes a long-term contract, well, we know that in order to get from Asia to the Mediterranean or the Mediterranean to Asia, it's going to take 10 to 12 days longer, and it's going to cost probably a million extra dollars to do that. But shipping's going to normalize that into the cost structure pretty quickly. And so this shift will happen and that will kind of normalize. So it's going to be interesting to see, in my opinion, I don't think they gain a lot by drawing this conflict out. By continuing to poll the us, the UK and other NATO countries into Counteroffensive tax against their position in the long term, it doesn't help them with what their goal is within the country of Yemen.

Speaker 1 (16:46):

I mean, even regionally, a nation like Egypt has the most to lose with the SUEZ being affected like this. So I'm curious to see, I know you mentioned the response of the US and the uk, but the Saudis in Egypt, I would expect their response to increase. Now, you also mentioned that the most affected route would be China to the Mediterranean, of course. Now, how involved has China been on security in military to prevent these attacks?

Speaker 2 (17:12):

So China does have, I believe, one military ship that is in that particular region. One of the things that we put out from an intelligence perspective is we don't feel that Chinese, Russian, or Iranian flag vessels are any threat within this region because the Houthis know that it would be very stupid for them to go after a Russian, a Chinese, or an Iranian back ship because those are countries that have the highest propensity to be able to provide support to them, whether it's monetary or through weapons. So we don't really see a high threat to that, but the Chinese have deployed a ship within this region. So there's an interesting dynamic because you're not talking about a big region in the ocean. So when you put all these different military ships and all these different things going on in a fairly narrow environment, that also could be an issue as we look forward on who coordinates this and what's going on. The US is obviously working with forces in nato, but the Chinese aren't part of that. So how do they figure into this dynamic and are they there just to escort Chinese flag ships, which most likely is more of a presence than probably anything else. We still believe that Chinese vessels don't have any sort of threat within this region.

Speaker 1 (18:36):

Now, for an Israeli ship in particular, this region must be totally off limits.

Speaker 2 (18:40):

Yeah, most of the Israeli ships, when we first started to see this already were diverting around and ships that had a connection to Israeli ownership or management. Were already diverting around the Cape, so we don't see really any vessels right now in this region that have any connection to Israel, whether that's delivering cargo to Israel or whether that's some kind of management or ownership of it.

Speaker 1 (19:08):

The Panama Canal, though, there's been droughts from what I understand that have caused them to limit the amount of ships that can go through. So is this also causing issues if you can't quite necessarily go east the same way from China?

Speaker 2 (19:23):

So I don't think that we haven't seen the issues as far as that are being caused within this region have a huge effect on the Panama Canal. There's been major delays because of the drought and what they need to do to be able to move ships through that. We did see, I believe it was a couple of weeks ago that they have lessened some of those restrictions to be able to get through the canal. So there's traffic moving, but there are still fairly major delays. I think the last time I looked, delays were could potentially, if you didn't have a transit slot, you could be delayed almost four to five weeks of waiting to be able to get through the canal and people who have slots. I haven't tracked this down and I thought it was pretty interesting, but I'd heard that people were buying Panama Canal slots for a million dollars if someone had a slot that someone else would come in and buy it to be able to go through.
(20:20)
Now, like I said, I haven't confirmed if that's the case, but it'd be interesting to see if it was. But if you look at the dynamics of, if you look at how cargo has moved to the United States from Asia, that almost a hundred percent comes across the Pacific Ocean and it hits a port on the United States, west coast. There are some ships that do transit on a regular route through the Panama Canal to deliver cargo to the Gulf and to the East Coast as they may be going on to Europe. But a lot of the US to Asia trade comes across the Pacific Ocean. There is some residual trade that does go through Europe and the Mediterranean from Asia and then into the United States, east coast, but the majority of that is coming across the west coast through the Pacific.

Speaker 1 (21:07):

And then some of the most major companies, I know there was the MSC mispronouncing, but Meck, the Danish company, Meck, some German French companies. So these guys all more or less said that they're going to seek alternative routes. But that was as of a few months ago.

Speaker 2 (21:24):

So the majority of what they mean by alternative routes is that the cargo that they're moving, probably specifically from Asia into the Mediterranean, is going around Africa. That's really the only route. I mean, you could route it eastbound through the United States, through the canal back into Europe, but the cost to do that is much more than going around the Cape. So if you look at Nathan, say a ship has 4,000 containers on board, if it costs a million dollars in 10 or 12 extra days, that's a few hundred dollars per container and okay, it's 10 or 12 days longer to get through, but we can really absorb that into the supply chain. So the economic effect realistically when you look at it for the extra operating costs is fairly minimal when you divide that by the number of containers. So there is some economics to this, but to your point earlier, you're absolutely correct in the fact that Egypt is feeling the biggest economic impact because they run, own and operate the Suez Canal. So they've seen probably a 50 plus percent reduction in canal fees because of the number of ships that are now diverting around Africa. So they're feeling the biggest economic impact, whereas the supply chain, I think if this goes long-term, we'll be able to absorb some of these costs.

Speaker 1 (22:48):

Is there any communication between the rebels and Yemen, Hezbollah and Southern Lebanon or Hamas and Gaza where let's say you make it through the suas, is there any communication that you could be hit on the backend south of Cyprus?

Speaker 2 (23:03):

I'm sure there's communication and coordination between the different entities as we believe that Iran is supporting a lot of what's happening here, either directly or indirectly. In some cases, it doesn't mean that they're controlling it. The Houthis, even though they have support from Iran, Iran isn't telling them, shoot this, do this or do that. In some cases they may be, but I think for the most part, the Houthis are still operating independently, but there is some backend coordination. We haven't seen attacks against ships. If you look at so Hezbollah based out of Lebanon, we've seen attacks back and forth across the border with Israel, between Hezbollah and the Army and the border, but we haven't seen that conflict spill in that particular region into the maritime. I don't think from the standpoint of Hezbollah and who they are, are really kind of interested in doing that.
(23:59)
Their interest is to move all the foreigners out of Lebanon. That's realistically what they're trying to do. So to go after shipping like the Houthis are doing it really, it doesn't fit into really who they are, but it's not to say, I mean, we see these crazy events happen all the time now that it's not to say that that could happen, but we haven't seen that. We haven't seen attacks go out into that region. When you talk about into Cyprus and over into that part of the Mediterranean, there's still shipping that's happening through that region, and it's fairly well protected. If you look at the number of military ships right now that are sitting off of the coast of Israel in that part of the far eastern Mediterranean, there are a ton of ships out there, aircraft carriers, destroyers, different vessels from different countries that have a fairly substantial protection lane out there. And we just haven't seen any issues or incursions into the shipping lanes in the far eastern Mediterranean.

Speaker 1 (25:02):

So that means that Libya has not posed too many issues?

Speaker 2 (25:06):

No, there's the normal issues that you see within, if you look at both Libya and Syria, and we monitor both of those countries as we have clients that are operating in and out of those countries, we have not seen a substantial change over what we would call normal events within Libyan, Syria when we're looking specifically at global shipping. Unless we have a client that has asked us to say, Hey, can you take a look at further inland or something kind of outside of the shipping? We'll do that. But pretty much we look at what's the integrity of the shipping lanes in and out of these different regions of the world. And we haven't seen at this point major stoppages of work or protests or riots or issues within these countries that would be related to the conflict that's happening in Israel. There's things that happen in both of these countries all the time, and there are strikes and protests and issues that will slow down or may shut down shipping in and out of the country temporarily, but we've been seeing that for a long time. So we're really calling that, hey, it's still normal operations within. If you look at Libby and Syria as to there've been no major change over the past few months with this conflict.

Speaker 1 (26:21):

From a security perspective, how would you approach, let's say a yacht versus a cargo ship versus a cruise one? What would be the different approach for those assets?

Speaker 2 (26:30):

I'll start with a large yacht. The large yachts are pretty interesting because they don't have to go anywhere. So a lot of times we'll have a large yacht client will call us and say, we're thinking about doing sort of trip. Can you give us a risk assessment? And they're very specific on what they want us to look at maybe kind of as an extension. With the large yachts, we look a lot further on shore. We look at a little bit more into political stability, crime on shore. We look at potentially ramifications based on who the owner is or the perception of who the owner might be. So we provide a little bit different assessment. The large yachts always can come to the opinion of like, well, we don't have to go there, so we're not going there. We're going to look at a different itinerary.
(27:16)
So it is pretty interesting to work with the large yachts and the cruise lines are very similar too. The cruise lines operate to say, well, we don't necessarily have to go there, so we're not going to go through. Or if they are repositioning, say, from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, then they'll build into the schedule to say, we may have to, if we're going to move into this region, we may move a ship from Asia over into the Middle East, into the Persian Gulf, into Dubai, Saudi into that region, or we may move a ship around. So they're very similar when it comes to the movement to be able to say, Hey, we just are not going to go into that area. And cruise lines. I think for the most part, the cruise lines that I've worked with do a very good job of really assessing that.
(28:04)
They have some very talented people that work for the cruise lines that are at the same level of some of our intelligence staff who are looking at these events, and we we'll provide support to them when necessary. Now, the cargo ships are very different. Cargo ships are chartered to move whatever that cargo may be, whether it's a container or bought cargo or some type of petroleum product or liquid cargo or whatever that may be from point A to point B. So we get involved with the charter operators, the fleet managers, and the cargo operations. Sometimes very fairly early on, they may say, we're looking to pick up this cargo route. Can you give us an assessment of what this looks like? So we provide an assessment to them to help them make the decision, do we want to pick up this cargo route? But we also work with them when those operations are ongoing as the threat assessment may change. We have clients that are moving cargo in and out of Ukraine, and you can imagine that's a pretty volatile situation that's been going on. Gosh, I think we're almost two years now, or yeah, we're over two years now into that. And so we provide assessments to those clients as to what's happening. So the cargo, these guys have to move cargo. So we try to provide them the best information on what's happening right now and what do we see, what could be an issue for them?

Speaker 1 (29:32):

Quickly do things change? Can a timeline for a yacht change by the hour or is that more a few days in advance.

Speaker 2 (29:39):

For a large yacht, if they feel any type of an issue, they could immediately change course and say, yep, we're not going to go there. We're going to turn around and we're going to divert to this location or whatever. And there's a client that we're actually working with right now that we're working with them on their primary transit route, but also alternates to be able to say, if there's an issue, where is a place for us to be able to go? So we are working with them on that because they need to move the boat from one location to another. So we're working with them on what some of the alternate safe harbors may be if they do encounter an issue. And sometimes that may not be security, sometimes it may be just a weather issue that, Hey, we're not going to press through in this particular storm, or Gail or hurricane force winds. We need to save port to get into what does that look like? So we provide that security perspective.

Speaker 1 (30:34):

You work at all with an insurance companies so that when they can kind of assess the risk, do they ask your company what the situation would look like?

Speaker 2 (30:42):

We have worked with insurance companies to be able to provide that information to them. That's usually, or in the past hasn't been on a permanent basis where we've had a couple of clients that we work with more on a permanent basis. But the most part, the insurance organizations will ask us to assess a risk of a port, of a location, of a country as kind of a one-off custom report. But one of the things that we see in the future as we continue to add information to our arms intelligence portal, that we think that we'll be working a lot more with the insurance companies because we're expanding beyond just safety and security. We're adding weather, we're adding the global regulatory database of environmental regulations. We're adding medical epidemics and disease outbreak information. We're adding information on GPS spoofing and just a bunch of issues and really looking to build one pane of glass. So if you look at the global kind of maritime risk management, it involves just more than safety and security, and that's really what we're building out is to be able to do that, to provide that information so an insurance company could use it, or shipping company, a large yacht cruise line, whomever.

Speaker 1 (31:59):

Earlier today, you mentioned cybersecurity. Can you just walk me through maybe what a cybersecurity attack would look like and who they would target and how?

Speaker 2 (32:07):

So from a cyber perspective, when you look at shipboard today, there's two types of common attacks. I think this attack vector is going to be changing, but when you look at cybersecurity, there's really two types of attack. One would be a man in the middle attack. So a man in the middle attack is where someone's email gets compromised and the attacker takes over the identity of that particular email and then has funds diverted into their, so what we've seen that happen a number of times where, and it's happened a lot in the large out industry where an attacker will take over either the email of the shore site agent or manager or the shipboard captain, and they're working on a charter agreement, and the attacker will say, yep, no problem. Wire the charter payment to this account and it's a nefarious account. Boom, the money goes, and nobody's of the wiser until they call up and say, Hey, we never got the payment for the charter.
(33:12)
And people will be like, well, what charter? And then they realize that the email's been compromised. So that's one of the most common attack vectors we've seen in the maritime industry as a whole. The second has been ransomware. So that would mean that there is nefarious software that would be attached to an email or software that would be launched into potentially an operating system with on a boat or through the email. You click on a file and then that is launched on the boat. And through that, typically what they do is we'll hold the systems for ransom. So they'll take control of the hardware basically and say, Hey, we've got your servers, your database, we've got your information. If you want it back, you have to pay us X number of dollars. Typically it's been done in Bitcoin, and then we'll release your information. Which is interesting because once you've been compromised, most likely you're not going to get the data back if you pay, and you're not going to get access back to your system.
(34:15)
So even though we've seen a number of people pay, it still takes months if not over a year for recovery in that. So it's really interesting. I think some of the attacks to the future may use some of that ransomware, but to be able to look at controlling different parts of the ship to be able to get payment, the hackers are interested in one thing and one thing only. For the most part, unless they're a state actor, the non-state actors who are hackers are looking for financial gain. That's all they want. They want to get paid.

Speaker 1 (34:51):

Which region are they coming from, or is this widespread?

Speaker 2 (34:54):

It's fairly widespread. You have your normal state actors, but it's interesting, we're seeing some of these hacking organizations are setting up just like a regular business. They have office space, they have hr, they have payroll, they have all of these things that you would see in a normal business. It's just their business is on the side of causing issues and trying to take money from people by compromising their computer systems.

Speaker 1 (35:21):

In that case, it must be relatively simple to track them down if they have such a legitimate business.

Speaker 2 (35:27):

No, it's pretty interesting. That's what's very difficult because you get into jurisdictional issues. So say I have a large yacht, I am a Cayman Island, flag yards large yacht. I'm managed by a company out of Hong Kong. The owner is out of Brazil and the yacht is sitting in the south of France. If my yacht gets attacked, who has primary jurisdiction? Well, maybe the French do because I'm sitting in France, but the ownership and flag is outside of the country. The attack came from somewhere else. So you really get into these really interesting jurisdictional issues. Now, if there's an asset, say inside a country, say a bank in the United States gets attacked and the bank loses a lot of money on this attack, then the FBI and the Secret Service would take as the primary jurisdiction, and it's much easier from that perspective. But when you're looking at vessels that are flagged in different countries, owned in different countries, managed in different countries and transit through different countries, it's really difficult to look at, okay, who has primary jurisdiction and who has the capability?
(36:37)
The flag state typically always has the primary jurisdiction, unless you're in the territorial waters of another country, but does the flag state or that country have the means to be able to go after it? And most of the time, a lot of these hackers are looking at amounts. When you look at maritime or large yachts under a hundred thousand dollars, most law enforcement agencies are not going to muster resources for a hundred thousand dollars attack. A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. But when you look at the grand scheme of things, they're looking at bigger state organizations and attackers that are funneling millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's a really interesting dynamic that there's a pretty interesting niche when it comes. When you look at the maritime environment.

Speaker 1 (37:25):

Cybersecurity, is this mostly developed by Dryad or do you outsource the code and the actual development process?Speaker 2 (37:32):

As far as the cyber or all?

Speaker 1 (37:35):

Yeah, I guess that technology itself, do you have a team of developers?Speaker 2 (37:40):

Yes. So for the ARMS platform, we do the majority of that development. There's a couple of outside developers that we do work with, but the majority of that develop as done in-House. All of that technology and intellectual property is all owned and managed and run and developed by Drive. So it's pretty unique that we are a tech company when it comes to that because we are developing those solutions. On the cyber side, we have some solutions that we've developed internally, but the backend of what powers a lot of our solutions is through Blackberry. So Blackberry is a big partner of ours on our maritime solutions base, which is pretty interesting because a lot of people know Blackberry. Oh, the phone company that had the keyboard, and I actually still carry a Blackberry. I think it's the best security, but it's the last Blackberry ever made, and pretty soon I'm going to have to give it up. But they have some very cybersecurity solutions and encryption solutions that we are deploying in the maritime environment that work extremely well in the shipboard and low connectivity environment. So it's been really interesting to partner with them. On the cyber piece

Speaker 1 (38:53):

That was a few years ago. That partnership started, or is this more recent?

Speaker 2 (38:57):

It is been in the last year. We just started this partnership a year ago, and we were looking for a partner because we didn't want to reinvent the proverbial wheel when it comes to cyber. There's a lot of great solutions out there. We just felt that for the maritime environment, because it's so different and unique that the Blackberry, what they were doing, the research and development, artificial intelligence, the integration of this was very, very conducive to use and develop that into the maritime industry.

Speaker 1 (39:28):

Around the world. Roughly how many ships would you say use your services?Speaker 2 (39:33):

I don't know, because a lot of what we do starts at the management and agent level. So when we provide information that sometimes goes out to hundreds, if not thousands of vessels, it really just depends on the management company. And sometimes we'll provide information just to one boat we've had that happens more within the large yacht industry where we have a group of clients that reach out to us directly for us to give them assessments. And it's a cost of assessment just for one boat, but we'll do that for all the way to boat level to fleet level.

Speaker 1 (40:06):

Oh, well, Corey, I think that's about all I have for you today. Anything else that you wanted to share before we wrap things up?

Speaker 2 (40:12):

The maritime environment is very dynamic and ever changing, and the one thing that a lot of people don't understand is when you look at the goods that we buy and the things that we use on a daily basis, about 90% of those goods have spent some time on a ship. So the global shipping and logistics industry is extremely important of how we move goods globally. The majority of that happens on board a ship. So when you start to look at that, like the computers, the printers, that desk I'm sitting at the lights, a lot of this stuff came to its final sail destination via ship, and I don't think a lot of people realize how that works. And it's a pretty big part of our global supply chain in the logistics industry.

Speaker 1 (41:00):

Absolutely. Yeah, my undergraduate degree was in supply chain, so I'm on board with this.

Speaker 2 (41:06):

Awesome.

Speaker 1 (41:07):

Well, so the best way to contact you if someone was interested would be via email or website.

Speaker 2 (41:13):

Sure. They can reach out to us via our website, global.com, D-R-Y-A-D global.com.

Speaker 1 (41:20):

I'll put it in the notes for you as well.

Speaker 2 (41:22):

Okay, perfect. That's the easiest way for people to be able to reach out. We have different emails depending on what they need are on there, our corporate phone numbers, everything is there. And they can also reach out to us too via social media. People love to do that. So you can connect with us on our social channels as well.

Speaker 1 (41:42):

Alright, well thank you Corey. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on today.

Speaker 2 (41:45):

Thanks, Nathan. This has been great.