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.
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.)
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.
Mark Murrell
It’s now 2025, which means I’ve officially been designing and building learning management systems (LMS) for 25 years. Much has changed in that time, and technology and the Internet have allowed us to develop online training tools we wouldn’t have imagined in the early 2000s.
When we launched CarriersEdge in 2005, online training for trucking companies wasn’t a thing. While other blue and white collared industries were using online systems to help in their training and educational programs, the trucking industry did it the old-fashioned way by training employees in a classroom-type setting. While in-person training remains an essential piece of a comprehensive training program in trucking, the use of online training has become the norm among fleets as learning management has advanced and become more available in the industry.
In fact, while scoring the 2025 edition of the Best Fleet to Drive For, for the first time ever in the 17 years we’ve produced the program, online training was the default training method across participating fleets.
As fleets increasingly rely on online training activities, choosing the right online system to support your operation and its safety goals is essential. When you select an online training provider, you should demo or trial the service to see if what’s offered is easy for users to manage and what tools you can use to deliver training courses to your employees effectively. In trucking, a few industry-specific features you should look out for include:
Compliance and audit support
Support for compliance tracking and audits is critical in trucking. With multiple enforcement agencies and insurance reps regularly wanting to verify training records and history, fleets need to be able to pull up training records quickly. Those records need to be accurate, and they should be detailed as well.
While many blue-collar learning management systems track compliance – whether users are currently up to date with required training – trucking needs more than that. Fleets often need to show that drivers were compliant at specific points in the past or have never been out of compliance. That goes well beyond what’s available in most general-purpose LMS.
The base assumption for all types of online systems is that a human is deciding the training requirements for a given population of workers, but in trucking, that’s no longer the case. With telematics and dashcams highlighting gaps in driver skills and knowledge, machines are increasingly involved in the process, and fleets need ways to integrate them easily.
A trucking LMS must recognize that human administrators and outside systems will be identifying training needs. There also needs to be ways for fleets to get both groups working together towards the same goal. Auto-assigning training is necessary, but the human managers need to be in the loop, so they always know what’s happening.
Managing driver options
It’s not uncommon for drivers to get moved from one fleet manager to another as their routes change. Most learning management systems assume workers are fairly static in their locations and roles, so they have minimal features to streamline the process of making changes.
To effectively serve the trucking industry, online systems need to make it easy to change not only manager and location assignments but also training requirements. If a driver moves from one customer to another or moves from regional to local or cross-border work, the types of training they need will change, too. The online system needs to handle that and automatically update the assignments consistently and reliably.
Driver turnover management
All blue-collar environments have employee turnover to deal with, but trucking is unique because a significant percentage of those exits often return at some point in the future. Fleets commonly delete accounts when drivers leave, but when those people return, it’s better to have the old account saved rather than having to create a brand new one.
Since that driver likely completed training during the previous employment, that history should come back, too. Forcing every returning driver to go through all the training they’ve already completed again because the previous history got wiped when they left, is a waste of time.
A trucking LMS needs to seamlessly handle drivers quitting and returning, making it easy to remove accounts when drivers leave, reactivate when they return, and retain all training history accurately to expedite onboarding.
Even if those drivers don’t return, that history may be needed in the future for lawsuits or when audits come up. It’s critical to keep it available but not clutter up the interface with records for people not currently employed at the fleet.
Drivers, safety and ops
Safety and operations teams often oversee drivers together. Ops teams may be responsible for the individual drivers (acting as the direct managers for them), but safety managers also play a role in overseeing safety programs and outlining what should be done to stay compliant and minimize the fleet’s risk profile. Learning management for trucking needs to recognize and support all three groups effectively. Safety managers may be the ones setting up the training programs and deciding when and what training drivers need to complete, but the operations team needs to be in the loop. They need to know what’s required of their drivers and when and what courses drivers are completing. The LMS needs to be easy for anyone to use so that all teams can see where drivers are at in their training, pull records, or input information when they need to without a lot of manual work.
Using an online system to help manage aspects of your overall safety program should make life easier as an administrator. If it’s too complex or doesn’t offer the right tools to more efficiently manage tasks, you’re using the wrong one. When deciding on which provider to use, make sure the capabilities offered will assist you in reaching your safety goals.
Joem Ohr
Cargo crime is no longer a problem confined to physical break-ins or rogue insiders. It has evolved into a sophisticated threat ecosystem where traditional theft intersects with cybercrime, organized fraud, and international criminal networks.
Estimated annual supply chain losses from fraud, intercepted shipments, and cargo theft have reached an eye-watering $15-35 billion according to data from the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agency. For today’s transportation leaders, understanding this complexity—and responding to it with a unified strategy—is no longer optional. It’s essential for survival in a high-risk logistics environment.
The spectrum of cargo crime now ranges from opportunistic pilferage to coordinated heists involving stolen identities, fake carriers, and manipulated telematics data. Increasingly, criminal organizations are targeting weak points in digital infrastructure—posing as legitimate brokers, intercepting sensitive shipment data, and using that intelligence to steal freight without ever setting foot near the loading dock.
In 2024 alone the industry saw a 27% increase in the number of reported cargo theft incidents over the previous year, according to CargoNet 2024 Supply Chain Risk Trends Analysis. While this is a significant increase, it unfortunately does not accurately represent the total scope of the issue as a significant number of incidents are not properly reported or investigated.
This evolution underscores a troubling reality: The transportation industry is now squarely in the crosshairs of cyber-enabled organized crime. The line between a cyber incident and a cargo theft event is increasingly blurred.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to solving the cargo crime epidemic, but the industry must align its response across the three interrelated spheres of responsibility.
Examples include, but are not limited to:
- Cybersecurity: Defend against account takeovers, identity theft, spoofed email communications, and data leaks that enable fraud and theft.
- Operational security: Verify trading partners and carrier identities, implement robust, consistent vetting procedures for all load assignments, and monitor for deviations in carrier behavior during dispatch, and have multiple verification methods and processes before any banking information is changed.
- Physical security: Use tamper-proof locks and tracking hardware, leverage geofencing and trailer immobilization technology, and partner with local law enforcement to monitor potential criminal activity in, or near, facilities and yards.
The cybersecurity controls that exist where these domains intersect hold the key to preventing cargo crime — cybersecurity controls support operational resilience, and physical safeguards often depend on cybersecurity systems or defenses to function securely and reliably. None of these practice areas can operate in a vacuum.
The cargo crime prevention ecosystem is vast and interconnected. Shippers, carriers, brokers, warehouse operators, technology vendors, insurers, regulators and law enforcement each hold a part of the solution — but no one entity holds all of it. For example, the complexities of the federal law enforcement system with its multiple agencies, task forces, and directives often self-limits its own effectiveness through unclear communication channels, competing priorities, and differences in prosecution thresholds. Add in those same nuances with state and local law enforcement — who are additionally hampered by jurisdictional limitations — and the issue becomes exponentially more complicated.
Effective prevention depends on synchronization of actions across many different entities. Cybersecurity experts must collaborate with fleet dispatch operations and broker’s carrier audit teams. Law enforcement must receive timely, accurate intelligence from private sector partners. Insurers and regulators must create incentives for proactive risk management and information sharing.
Transportation executives must understand that cargo theft is no longer just a security or financial liability issue, it is a business continuity and reputational risk issue as well.
A single fraudulent pickup can result in six or even seven-figure losses, potentially unrecoverable through insurance.
A successful telematics platform compromise could give thieves access to an entire fleet’s location data.
A compromise of credentials to transportation management system (TMS) or load board accounts can expose critical details about high-value shipments and customer details which can lead to impersonation and facilitate fraudulent pickups.
Broker or carrier impersonation schemes can destroy relationships built over decades with trusted carriers or customers.
To effectively address cargo crimes in the modern era, executives must champion a holistic approach to security within their organizations. This means funding a comprehensive combination of cyber, operational, and physical security initiatives to ensure successful mitigation of the risks associated with cyber-enabled cargo crime.
Establishing relationships across the prevention ecosystem is critical. Cybersecurity is a team sport—join intelligence-sharing networks, industry associations, and joint task forces or working groups. Communicating openly will break down traditional silos between internal departments leading to more reliable identification of risks in real-time across the organization.
Accountability is key to a successful security strategy—make risk ownership clear across all business units, not just IT or dispatch operations. Cyber-enabled cargo crime is a complex and fast-moving issue, but with decisive leadership, coordinated holistic defenses, and industry-wide collaboration, we can stay ahead of this growing challenge.
To this end, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association, Inc. (NMFTA) is working with both law enforcement and industry peers to research and develop cyber-enabled cargo crime mitigation strategies that will be released in June to support carriers, brokers, shippers and all other parties throughout the logistics supply chain.
Take decisive action now to ensure you protect your fleet/organization/company from these evolving threats.
Access free resources and learn more about the trucking industry’s only cybersecurity conference, NMFTA Cybersecurity Conference, by visiting www.nmfta.org/cybersecurity.
CCJ Staff
The J2497 is the Power Line Carrier Communications for Commercial Vehicles and successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a nearby attacker to activate or disable a trailers brakes. There are so many sensors and computing power on a truck, you’d think the tractor would be the focus of a cyberattack, but the trailer is more likely to be the initial actual target.
Click on the link below to see video.
https://youtu.be/4gI97x5zze0
