Addressing Cyber Threats to Oil and Gas Suppliers, researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations discuss cyber threats against the U.S. oil and gas industries. These threats are of two types — cyber espionage and cyber sabotage.
The authors relate the history of these attacks. They discuss some of the sensitive competitive information that has been stolen through cyber espionage. This data includes strategic plans, competitive bidding data and geologic data. Regarding cyber sabotage, the authors note that despite several attempts at creating physical damage to US infrastructure, cyber sabotage has only managed to incapacitate systems. The authors report that there have been two reported cases of cyber sabotage damaging systems — the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities in 2009 and the 2012 Shamoon attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco state oil company which disabled 30,000 computers. Experts fear that the Shamoon attack could have damaged the oil production facility had it penetrated further into the network. The authors conclude with this ominous warning:
The number and sophistication of attacks on U.S. oil and gas companies appears to be increasing. Likewise, their potential for inflicting damage on critical infrastructure is growing, with last year’s Shamoon virus illustration the growing potency of cyber threats. Creating widespread destruction or disruption still remains difficult, and is probably out of reach for all but sophisticated state-based or state-supported actors. But these capabilities will diffuse to others over time, and there are risks that a relatively unsophisticated attack could have a more widespread impact because of unexpected spillover effects.
The importance of defending against cyber attacks cannot be overstated. Many layers of defense must be used to defend against cyber attack. SP Guard is an important layer in that defense — helping employees avoid spearphishing attacks in email. Using SP Guard, IT can determine a list of trusted senders and provide this information to staff in a simple and highly effective manner.
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