Is Oil The Next Target of Cyber Warfare?

Until recently, cyber warfare was considered as a hostile act by one nation and/or state against another’s computers, networks, online records or confidential government data to cause harm or disruption but few weeks backs, a news warned us that even a single cyber attack can severely affect the whole world and every person living in it.

Last month, news appeared on the media (although, it did not attract much attention of the world as it deserved) quoting the IT Manager of Shell that the cyber attacks on the IT systems and controls have been intensified. The first major cyber attack on oil companies occurred in 2010 when an attempt to disrupt the process controls was made. Computers control almost all of the production and distribution of the world’s oil and any successful attempt can bring disastrous results for all of us.
“If anybody gets into the area where you can control opening and closing of valves, or release valves, you can imagine what happens,” said Ludolf Luehmann, IT manager at Shell, Europe’s biggest company”.
“It will cost lives and it will cost production, it will cost money, cause fires and cause loss of containment, environmental damage - huge, huge damage,” he told the World Petroleum Congress in Doha.
Now, the hackers have changed their style and first they silently enter in the computer systems of the oil companies and collect information. After digging out the necessary information, they hit any particular function or process of the company. As compare to other industries, the oil companies and installations are unlucky that they cannot stop their operations to do a protective measure or update their IT systems against any such threat.
“We have a very strategic position in the global oil and gas market, If they could bring down one of the big players in the oil and gas market you can imagine what this will do for the oil price - it would blow the market.” said Riemer Brouwer, head of IT security at Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO).
It is the duty of the whole global community to sit together and chalk out a solution of this problem because if all the governments of the world along with the large oil companies will draw a strategy to cope with this, they can easily prove themselves a stronger power as compare to the hackers in terms of resources, countering the cyber war against the blood which runs in the arteries of the world’s body, expertise and all the other things.