The Ferry Website Flooded Before Boarding

The ferry is ready, but passengers cannot retrieve their boarding codes—and terminal staff cannot access bookings. What happens when a public website becomes a hidden dependency for a physical service? This fictional scenario follows Maya, terminal manager at the invented Estuary Link Ferries, as a DDoS attack disrupts the shared booking service behind ticket sales and boarding. The vessel remains operational, but departure decisions depend on accurate records, capacity controls and a coordinated fallback. Explore three practical lessons: map the systems behind the customer journey, prepare an independent offline procedure, and test protection and recovery against operational needs. The scenario examines duplicate tickets, late bookings, accessible passenger assistance, customer updates and reconciliation after service returns. All people, organisations and events depicted are fictional. This is a business continuity learning scenario, not a report of an actual incident. What you will learn Trace how a public booking outage affects boarding and customer support. Practise a controlled fallback with the records terminal staff actually need. Connect the technical issue to the people, decisions and everyday work affected by it. Use this video with your team This episode is for business owners, managers, staff and IT colleagues who want to discuss cybersecurity in plain English. Watch together, choose one relevant process, and agree who will check it, what evidence they will collect and when you will review the result. Use an authorised exercise with artificial records when testing a change. Join the discussion Could your physical service continue if customers could not retrieve online bookings? Share your approach in the comments without including confidential information. If this explanation helped, like the video, share it with a colleague and subscribe to Bovens GRC Solutions for more practical cybersecurity lessons. #DDoS #DistributedDenialOfService #Cybersecurity #BusinessContinuity #OperationalResilience #FerryOperations #BookingSystemOutage #OfflineBoarding #IncidentResponse #DependencyMapping #ServiceAvailability #DuplicateTicketChecks #DisasterRecoveryExercises #CustomerCommunication #CybersecurityLessons