Cybersecurity in Critical Logistics and Port Infrastructure: A Bibliometric Review of Threats, Standards, and Resilience Strategies

Abstract

Ports are cyber-physical systems, and compromising them has physical consequences: paralysed cranes, blocked gates and cargo that does not move. Research on protecting them remains divided between cybersecurity engineering, port management and supply chain studies, with no shared unit of analysis. This review adopts the maritime port supply chain as that unit and asks which vulnerabilities and threat vectors are specific to its IT and operational technology (OT) environments, which regulatory instruments apply and how they interrelate, and which resilience strategies the literature supports, and on what kind of evidence. A combined bibliometric and qualitative review design was adopted to provide both a macro-level overview of the field and an in-depth examination of the technical and regulatory evidence. In total, 21,268 records were retrieved from Scopus and the Web of Science, of which 14,659 remained after deduplication and the application of a 2010 lower bound. The corpus was mapped with bibliometrix and VOSviewer and examined qualitatively alongside relevant regulatory instruments. Five thematic clusters emerge, showing a temporal shift from SCADA and infrastructure protection towards intrusion detection, IoT and machine learning. Exposure is cumulative: IT enables access, OT determines consequence, and software supply chains propagate both. The regulatory regime remains ship-biassed, with the main gap lying in implementation rather than in the absence of instruments. The controls most consistently recommended are architectural and organisational rather than novel, but only one of the thirteen appraised is supported by three or more independent sources generated in port or maritime settings. A framework for proactive port cyber resilience is proposed.