The US's busiest container port foiled more than 120 million cyberattack attempts in August, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka told Bloomberg Television, citing intrusion, network-exploitation, credential-harvesting and malware attempts. Seroka said the port's security operations team, in coalition with private-sector businesses, runs a "seven-layer digital defense" around its operations, and that "all they have to do is get it right one time" — the port is a high-value recourse target while ships divert from the Suez and Panama Canals. The disclosure came as US officials confirmed government agencies are tracking cyber threats against nearly 20 ships worldwide. The figure reframes the maritime threat as volumetric rather than purely surgical: a single critical facility absorbing 120 million attempts in a month, on top of the US Coast Guard tanker boarding of last week, shows both massed botnet-style probing and highly targeted campaign activity are running in parallel against port and vessel networks. Australian port operators facing similar diversion-driven volume increases, and ASIO/AMSA's standing warnings on Australian infrastructure, should read this as the measure of the contemporary attack rate.

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