Windward

At a Glance A vessel moving narcotics and a vessel moving sanctioned crude face the same problem, which is moving without being identified, and they solve it the same way. …

At a Glance Between October 5 and 28, three U.S.-sanctioned tankers and an Iran-flagged fishing-support vessel slowed, looped, turned back, and went dark over the undersea cable corridors off Oman’s …

At a Glance Gulf oil producers have gained control of a fleet of nearly 230 tankers shipping oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Tankers load dark and transit Hormuz via …

At a Glance France has boarded six suspected shadow fleet tankers since September 2025, most recently south of Réunion on October 12, 2026. The cases turned on the same question: …

At a Glance IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said on October 19 that seven major internet cables run beneath the Strait of Hormuz and that new targets and new weapons would …

At a Glance Information advantage and allied interoperability only mean something when partners work from the same picture. Dark fleet activity crosses combatant command boundaries, so each partner sees only …

At a Glance Claims Teams Are Now Reconstructing, Not Just Investigating Claims teams in marine insurance own two things: the loss investigation and the pay-or-reject decision. In the pre-2022 environment, …

At a Glance Trade data was built to answer commercial questions about flows, volumes, and counterparties, not enforcement questions about concealment. The vessel a customs agency needs to stop is …

At a Glance Hawaii and Guam concentrate Pacific undersea cable risk, and Honolulu sits directly on that infrastructure. Most cable faults are accidental, so a damaged cable alone says little …

At a Glance Russia shipped 142.7 million barrels of crude and oil products in September, with crude holding steady at about 3.7 million barrels per day. No cargo was loaded …

At a Glance A tanker struck by multiple projectiles off Qatar on October 7 marks the first attack outside the Strait of Hormuz since September 9. UKMTO has reported 16 …

At a Glance RoRo vessel calls at the Port of NEOM have climbed from a pre-war average of 17 per month to 30 in September 2026, almost all on the …

At a Glance A Mali-flagged general cargo vessel went dark for 25 days off eastern Libya between August 28 and September 23, 2026. The vessel sailed from an Albanian port …

At a Glance Windward identified 45 Russia-trading shadow fleet tankers connected through 45 single-ship Hong Kong companies to one beneficial owner. Forty-two of the 45 are sanctioned, and the three …

At a Glance Two Chinese state-linked vessels spent September running structured survey grids over separate transpacific subsea cable corridors, one around the Guam cable hub and one over the Japan …

At a Glance The shadow fleet is the ecosystem of tankers and support vessels using deceptive shipping practices to move sanctioned or high-risk cargo while concealing origin, ownership, or destination. …

At a Glance Suez containership transits rose 59% between March and September 2026, from 139 to 221. The growth came from large ships of 300m and above, which rose from …

2,157 cargo ships and tankers over 10,000 DWT went dark in Q2 2026, nearly five times the 449 recorded in Q1. Prolonged dark events, three days or longer, rose sevenfold …

Iran has demanded that all Strait of Hormuz transits use the northern corridor through its territorial waters. Rising volumes of Saudi, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti crude, along with UAE volumes that …

At a Glance One product tanker recorded 15 distinct meeting partners across two anchorage clusters in 90 days, with four transfers confirmed by cargo model. The structure is a relay, …

At a Glance All 77 vessels blacklisted by Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority used the “unauthorized” southern corridor through Omani waters or transited Iran’s northern corridor without paying tolls. Inclusion …

At a Glance Operational Overview Saudi Arabia’s workaround to the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz came under direct attack last week. Saudi Arabia diverted crude to the Red …

At a Glance Six state-linked vessels operated above 11 subsea cable systems across the Pacific and Atlantic, plus a Baltic corridor between July and August 2026. The behavior is consistent, …

At a Glance Underwriting Is a Pricing Decision Made on Incomplete Data Underwriters carry the pricing decision at two moments in the coverage process. At binding, the underwriter takes compliance’s …

At a Glance OFAC doubled its retention requirement from five to ten years, effective March 12, 2025, and stated that conflicting obligations elsewhere do not excuse compliance. The four major …

At a Glance The Panama Canal will run 32 daily transits from September 15, down from a capacity of roughly 40. The cuts are arriving during the rainy season, the …

At a Glance Five recurring complaints signal that screening volume has outgrown headcount, not that the team is underperforming. Up to 9 in 10 vessels can return a clear go …

At a Glance Windward MIOC has documented 20 confirmed sea chest contamination cases across four continents since 2017, with cumulative seizures above 2 tonnes. The method is simple. A dive …

Sustained Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining capacity have produced something not seen since the start of the war: Russia importing gasoline and diesel at scale. Windward’s analysis of shipping data, …

In Q2 2026, Windward recorded 3,667 loitering events lasting more than 12 hours above subsea cables, 3,137 prolonged dark activity events involving 2,157 unique cargo ships and tankers over 10,000 …

A vessel’s AIS track goes quiet. A ship slows and holds position outside a shipping lane. A port call shows cargo that doesn’t match what left the previous port. Each …

A vessel’s AIS track goes quiet. A ship slows and holds position outside a shipping lane. A port call shows cargo that doesn’t match what left the previous port. Each …

At a Glance Naval intelligence operates against two fundamentally different analytical problems in the same waters, with adversarial tracking and commercial monitoring requiring different questions, different behavioral baselines, and different …

At a Glance The Navy’s Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs) already receive more data than they can operationally use , with the constraint on decision advantage now sitting at the fusion …

At a Glance A falsely flagged vessel is a ship that broadcasts the flag of a country whose maritime administration has not authorized the vessel to fly it, either because …

At a Glance Compliance managers touch four of the five stages of the marine insurance coverage process, from underwriting through ongoing monitoring, claims support, and renewal. The operating environment has …

At a Glance Naval procurement conversations are framed around vessel tracking, but tracking and intelligence solve different problems, and raw AIS feeds only ever deliver the first half. AIS was …

At a Glance MINOAN DIGNITY, a Liberia-flagged bulk carrier, was struck by an unknown projectile in its engine room while transiting outbound through the Strait of Hormuz southern corridor overnight …

At a Glance Two ADNOC-affiliated vessels were struck by UAVs while transiting the Strait of Hormuz on August 14, with no injuries reported, in the second ADNOC-linked incident in under …

At a Glance The Department of the Navy’s FY27 budget request of $377.5 billion represents a 23% year-over-year increase and signals a procurement posture built around speed, modularity, and commercial …

At a Glance President Trump stated the U.S. has total control of the Strait of Hormuz via its naval blockade, while Iran said it still controls the waterway and plans …

At a Glance Two of Australia’s subsea internet cables, Indigo West and Indigo Central, were damaged inside the Submarine Cable Protection Zone off Perth over the weekend of August 9-10, …

At a Glance TIHAMAH, a Tanzanian-flagged general cargo vessel, was struck near Perim Island off Al Mokha on August 11, killing three crew members, the first fatalities from a Houthi …

At a Glance Dark activity refers to periods when a vessel stops broadcasting its Automatic Identification System (AIS) signal, during which the vessel’s position, course, and identity are not visible …

Satellite imagery has always shown you what’s in a scene. Every dot, every wake, every hull is a detection. What it hasn’t done, until now, is tell you who that …

At a Glance The Legal Landscape Is Shifting Legal commentary on Strait of Hormuz-related maritime disputes has grown consistently through 2026. Holland & Knight’s March 2026 analysis flagged the rising …

At a Glance Kharg Island’s crude export pipeline has been at a complete standstill since July 31, with all three terminals empty, zero Vortexa-recorded departures across 10 days, and the …

At a Glance The Houthis claimed a ballistic missile strike on NCC WAFA, a Saudi-flagged MR2 tanker, off Yanbu on August 5, hitting a vessel on a purely domestic Saudi …

At a Glance Ukrainian sea drones struck BOURDA, a Liberian-flagged Greek-owned Aframax tanker near Taman on August 1, one of the first confirmed strikes on a vessel not part of …

At a Glance Marine insurance is being asked to price risk in an operational environment that has changed structurally, with sanctioned fleets, degraded AIS reliability, and open conflict in the …