Now that 2025 has drawn to a close, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA) cybersecurity team is already looking ahead to the trends that will shape the transportation industry’s cybersecurity landscape in 2026.
Our 2026 Transportation Industry Cybersecurity Trends Report was released in mid-December. As with each annual report, the team dug deep into the progress and challenges the industry has faced over the past 12 months. Building on years of findings, we’re eager to share what’s working, where the industry still has room to improve, and what to expect over the next year.
Whether your focus is on preventing cyber-enabled cargo theft, guarding enterprise data from ransomware and extortion attempts, or preventing malicious activity related to your rolling assets, this report has information for you. NMFTA acknowledges that we are making good progress across the industry in our efforts to increase our baseline cybersecurity hygiene and also highlights some specific areas where we have additional opportunities for growth.
An area that has shown recent progress is on the legislative side. There are signs that both the House and the Senate are focusing efforts on addressing cargo crime in the transportation industry with an increasing number of co-sponsors signed on to both H.R.2853 and S.1404 (Combating Organized Retail Crime Act) nearly every week. More recently, S.3376 (A bill to require the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration to establish a pilot project to evaluate the effectiveness of technologies to combat cargo theft, and for other purposes) was introduced by Sen. Blackburn (R-TN) with a specific focus on developing pilot programs at intermodal freight hubs to find innovative technologies that can aid in the fight against cargo theft.
NMFTA continues to both monitor these bills as well as support government efforts to address the cargo crime epidemic.
NMFTA’s ongoing efforts to facilitate more effective federal-level support for cargo crime reduction and improved cybersecurity readiness in the transportation industry have been noted at the executive level with NMFTA’s Executive Director Debbie Sparks and I being invited to the Eisenhower Executive Office in Washington, DC to meet with the Office of the National Cyber Director to discuss our efforts on education of the industry on cybersecurity and freight fraud. Top issues like credential harvesting and need vulnerabilities withing the transportation sector were discussed. We then transitioned to spend the afternoon at U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) headquarters and discussed the various efforts to combat freight fraud and how NMFTA and the industry can assist.
As I look back at 2025, I am struck by how much progress has been made, and how many challenges have been overcome in this industry in the past 12 months. To better support the transportation industry and supply chain, the team released several guidebooks, frameworks, and checklists to aid fleets of all sizes in developing practical cybersecurity programs that were both affordable and robust.
Our asset research team collaborated on vulnerability reports, brought the first generation cybersecurity assessment tool for trucks to the industry and opened the project up for feedback at our annual conference. Even now, work is ongoing by the team to reverse-engineer a number of Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), extracting firmware and researching the hardware components to determine the prevalence of white-labeling across brands and devices.
Resilience and teamwork were recurring themes throughout the year. Efforts to improve threat intelligence sharing across the industry, strengthening of collaborations with federal law enforcement agencies, and several burgeoning collaborative relationships with the DoE through Oakridge National Laboratories (ORNL), the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) are giving us indicators of where the industry is headed; and it’s a good direction!
Nowhere was this collaborative environment more clearly visible than at our annual NMFTA Cybersecurity Conference in October. Austin, Texas, saw quite the influx of transportation cybersecurity professionals who came together to learn, collaborate, and to help propel the industry forward into the next year. We’re all already counting the weeks until our 2026 conference. It will be held in sunny Long Beach, Calif., Sept. 29-Oct. 2, 2026.
Looking forward to 2026, I am hopeful. Not hopeful that it will be an easy year, or that it will bring us fewer challenges than this past year did. I am hopeful that this industry will continue to rise to the challenge, to strengthen our bonds with one another, and with the federal, state and local government agencies that support and protect our industry.
Additionally, I am optimistic about the opportunities for collaboration between fleets, brokers, shippers, industry associations, and government agencies that we will be able to take advantage of over the next year. I am optimistic about the future of this one-of-a-kind industry because I see every day the grit, determination, and skill that makes up each of our organizations.
Cybersecurity is a team sport, and this industry is gaining momentum every single day.
