Are you ready for the next era of cybersecurity and cargo crime prevention?

Joe Ohr

Cybersecurity is no longer just a concern for the largest carriers—mid-sized fleets are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of cybercriminals. That’s why the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) ™ has released its latest Cybersecurity Guidebook for Mid-Sized Fleet, expanding its Roadmap to Resilience initiative to support fleets with up to 3,000 assets.

Like NMFTA’s previous guidebooks for owner-operators and small fleets, this new resource offers practical, easy-to-follow steps. But what sets this version apart is the depth of coverage: it walks fleet operators through core cybersecurity best practices and then builds on that foundation with more advanced technical and operational controls.

Once this foundation is covered, additional layers of technical and operational controls are introduced to bring the overall resilience of the organization to an advanced level and to prepare them to consistently and effectively address the ever-changing threat landscape present in the trucking industry.

The guidebook emphasizes starting with the basics—strong passwords, access management, and regular software updates—before introducing scalable strategies to help fleets respond to today’s fast-evolving threats. It’s all about boosting resilience and creating a proactive security culture tailored to the unique challenges faced by mid-sized trucking operations.

For fleets that don’t have full-time IT security staff, this guidebook offers a clear and actionable roadmap to help them stay ahead of cyber risks—and stay on the road.

To view all guidebooks in this series, click here.

To support this guidebook, NMFTA hosted its latest cybersecurity webinar on this subject which featured Artie Crawford, director of cybersecurity and Ben Wilkens, cybersecurity principal engineer for NMFTA, as well as Robert Gray, director of information assurance for AAA Cooper Transport. The group talked through the concepts and controls addressed by this guidebook.

If you missed it, the on-demand version is worth a watch—full of practical tips on how to launch and scale a security program rooted in real-world trucking experience. Access the recording here.

We also just wrapped up our call for abstracts for the 2025 NMFTA Cybersecurity Conference—thank you to everyone who submitted! We were humbled and thrilled by the level of interest we received this year, and we’re looking forward to sharing the speaker lineup and session topics soon. Be sure to sign up for updates at www.nmftacyber.com—this event is expected to sell out fast.

Looking ahead, the NMFTA’s Cybersecurity team will be shifting gears to take a deep dive into the intersection of cybersecurity and cargo crime in the trucking and logistics industry.  As incidents like fraudulent pick-ups, and illegitimate double-brokering scams rise, we’re launching a new research initiative focused on how cyber protections can help prevent cargo theft. The prevention guide will first focus on defining the role that cybersecurity plays in reducing an organization’s risk from cyber-enabled cargo crime as well as the intersections between cybersecurity, operational security and physical security specific to the transportation sector.

Everyone in the transportation sector—from carriers to drivers, to brokers and third-party logistics providers (3PLs)—wants to stop cargo theft, but it’s not as straightforward as preventing a bad actor from unloading freight off of the back of a truck. The NMFTA cybersecurity team will be digging into the complex relationships between the multiple business units within and between trucking and logistics organizations, between private industry and the various law enforcement agencies involved in responding to and investigating cargo crime, and the various local, state, and federal jurisdictions that become involved due to the widespread geographic areas often covered by a single cargo theft event. If this isn’t enough, the various local, state and federal prosecutors all maintain their own thresholds when it comes to which cases are “worth prosecuting.”

Once the scope of the issue and complex nature of the relationships and entities involved in preventing, investigating and prosecuting cargo crimes have been defined and researched thoroughly, the Guide will provide clear, concise guidance for controls that organizations can implement to directly address the costly threat of cargo crime facilitated by cybersecurity gaps in their operation.

Throughout this project, the NMFTA cybersecurity team will be conducting webinars, research papers, and articles sharing their findings. The team will be working across the industry and with multiple law enforcement agencies to establish a comprehensive body of research, resources, and relationships that will enable organizations to more effectively prevent, report, and investigate cargo crime.

We look forward to sharing this work with our industry peers in the coming months.

Overwhelmed by ensuring your operations are cybersecure? Talk with like-minded peers at the trucking industry’s only cybersecurity conference: NMFTA Cybersecurity Conference, set Oct. 26-28 in Austin, Texas.

Access our free resources and learn more about the cybersecurity conference by visiting www.nmfta.org/cybersecurity.

Hours of service too rigid, Office of Advocacy tells DOT

Mark Schremmer

Relaying concerns from truckers, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy recently told the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration that its hours of service are too rigid.

“Advocacy understands that hours-of-service regulations are statutorily mandated but believes that the FMCSA should seek regulatory changes that would improve safety by providing greater flexibility and give small businesses and drivers more control over their driving time,” the agency wrote.

Deregulatory effort

In April, the U.S. Department of Transportation asked the public to identify regulations that can be modified or repealed to reduce the regulatory burden.

Following the request, the Office of Advocacy hosted a small-business regulatory roundtable on April 14. About 100 people participated in the roundtable, delivering comments on 36 issues. The issues that received the most attention were hours of service, entry-level driver training, speed limiters and broker transparency.

On May 5, the Office of Advocacy filed official comments to the DOT. Overall, about 900 comments were filed to the docket.

Hours of service

The lack of flexibility within the hours of service was a common theme in comments filed by the Office of Advocacy, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and individual truckers.

“Small-business representatives stated that the existing hours-of-service rules are not sensible for today’s trucking industry because they force truckers to be on the road when they are tired, during busy travel times and during hazardous weather and road conditions,” the agency wrote.

Prompted by a petition from OOIDA, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration modified its hours-of-service regulations in 2020 to provide truck drivers more flexibility within the rules. Those modifications involved exceptions for short haul and adverse driving conditions, a sleeper berth provision and a change to the 30-minute break requirement. However, OOIDA and individual truckers don’t believe those changes went far enough.

OOIDA wants the regulation modified to allow truckers to “pause” their clock and to utilize expanded split sleeper-berth options, such as 6/4 and 5/5.

“This flexibility would improve drivers’ rest and alertness,” OOIDA wrote. “It makes far more sense to allow alert drivers to leave the sleeper berth and begin driving with the option to obtain additional rest later in the day, rather than forcing drivers to idly wait for their driving clock to restart. More restrictive sleeper berth splits can force a trucker to drive when tired and rest when alert. The truth is that not all drivers are able to sleep seven, eight or 10 hours at a time. Thus, allowing them to split their sleeper time more efficiently will help them to gain more adequate rest, resulting in increased alertness and better driver performance.”

The Office of Advocacy also relayed a list of recommendations regarding the hours of service:

• Amend HOS regulations to provide more efficiency for drivers and establish FMCSA pilot programs to analyze expanded flexibility options, including a “split-duty” period and additional split sleeper berth options.(The FMCSA removed the old split sleeper.)
• Clarify through guidance that the HOS regulations apply only to employees and not to self-employed carriers.  (Guidance does not have the standing of regulation. The HOS regulations must apply to both company drivers, OOs and independent drivers.)
• Provide separate regulations for the short-haul trucking industry similar to how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has separate regulations for general industry, construction and maritime.(OSHA applies to non-highway and FMCSA applies to highway.)
• Recognize that last-mile delivery companies highlight the unique challenges of short-haul trucking. As such, safety measures based on miles do not accurately reflect the risks faced by short-haul drivers.(Fatigue vs. greed.)
• Recognize that HOS complexity is contributing to the driver shortage problem and impacting the economic incentives facing drivers.(Is there a real driver shortage?)
• Provide a consistent policy for preemptively and proactively declaring an emergency so FMCSA has a preemptive policy for declaring a regional emergency at least five days in advance of a reliably predicted disaster.
• Consider exempting livestock haulers from the HOS regulations due to the demands associated with livestock care, labor challenges, driver shortages and supply chain concerns. (A fatigued truck driver transporting livestock or fatigued truck driver transporting widgets are both unsafe and contribute to unsafe commercial vehicle highway safety.)

Why attention span isn’t the problem with your training program

Mark Murrel

Pay attention. Is it true our attention spans are becoming, well, less attentive? After all, smartphones, social media, and all the other high tech gizmos seem to enthrall us on a daily basis. Tech can be a productivity enhancer, but it can also have a negative impact.

The accessibility of our phones and other technologies makes it easy to switch our attention to things we find more enjoyable or entertaining. This can complicate things in learning environments or at work.

When it comes to training your drivers, it’s important to know if (and for how long) they are going to pay attention to you. Can you sit them down for a whole day, or are you stuck with TikTok-level soundbites? If the real problem is a societal one (i.e., if everybody’s attention span is faltering), it might feel like there is nothing we can do to make training more compelling except make it shorter. But is it true? The answer is surprisingly straightforward.

Perception of training

“My drivers can’t focus that long. All they want is shorter training.” There’s a longstanding perception that drivers don’t like to do training (and want to do as little of it as possible), and that perception has been around longer than the recent hand-wringing about attention and focus.

What’s going on?

So, have attention spans gotten shorter and is that really the issue? The answer is that our total attention span, across all contexts, can’t be measured in a one-shot deal. Looking at a Word document (and then looking away) isn’t like playing a board game or doing safety training. Are there more distractions than there were just 10 or 15 years ago? For sure. And has that made it harder to focus on things we’re not that invested in (like Word docs or random internet videos)? Definitely. But that doesn’t tell us much about what’s going on in the context of safety training.

The truth is that attention is goal-oriented; the amount and depth of attention we pay to something depends on how clear the goal is, how desirable it is, and how engaging the process of getting there is. If your mind is locked into a movie for a solid two hours, it’s probably because the story is engaging, and you’re invested in seeing what happens. But if you’re mindlessly scrolling through social media reels, it’s because it’s not that engaging for more than a few seconds, and you’re not really invested in getting something out of it.

If your drivers are looking at their phones while you’re holding an in-class training event, it’s probably not because humanity has suffered a critical failure in attention. It might just be that they’re bored. That’s not an attention-ability thing; it’s a content, context and goal thing.

You could tailor your material to be shorter and snappier, to grab whatever attention they are giving you before they look at their phone again, but all you’re really doing is admitting that your material isn’t engaging enough and the goal of it isn’t ingrained enough in your people.

The takeaway

So, what’s the issue? I don’t think it’s true that drivers want less training. In fact, according to the most recent Best Fleets to Drive For driver survey, over 90% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that ongoing training is important.

However, there can still be some legitimate barriers to getting driver buy-in, and reasons they might be asking for shorter training. For example:

• Pay If you are paying by the mile and then pulling your drivers off the road to do training, it’s easy to see why they would be reticent to do it or, at least, would want that training to be as short as possible. But there are lots of companies out there who have addressed this head-on with either bonuses or straight pay for training.
• Relevance If the training is thin, lacks relevance or is condescending, of course drivers will want less of it. Good training doesn’t have to give the experience of an endless stream of TikTok videos, but it should push the learner to use different parts of their brain at various stages of the training. But keeping it fresh doesn’t have to mean keeping it short.
• Clear goals Like watching a movie and being invested in seeing what happens at the end, or focusing on a board game because you want to win, the goal of the training should be clear and identifiable. Connecting the action of doing training to a larger, overall, value-laden goal of safety (one that extends across all of the driver’s activities, not just during training), will solve the “why am I doing this” problem. This is particularly critical because, as we’ve seen, attention is goal-directed. Make sure they know what the goal is.

If drivers are asking for shorter training, it’s probably less helpful to write that off as a function of a waning ability to pay attention to things. Instead, think about what else might be going on —there’s a good chance that the real issue is how locked in your drivers are to your training culture as a goal and how timely, relevant, and contextual the material is (and whether or not they are getting paid). Arguments that reduce training issues to a matter of society-level attention problems aren’t the issue; there’s something else going on that needs to be addressed.