Saudi Arabia says cyber attack aimed to disrupt oil, gas flow
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | December 10, 2012 13:28Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, said on Sunday a cyber attack against it in August which damaged some 30,000 computers was aimed at stopping oil and gas production at the biggest OPEC exporter.
The attack on Saudi Aramco — which supplies a tenth of the world’s oil — failed to disrupt production, but was one of the most destructive cyber strikes conducted against a single business.
Aramco and the Saudi Interior Ministry is conducting an investigation into the cyber strike. Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said the attackers were an organized group operating from different countries on four continents.
The attack used a computer virus known as Shamoon which infected workstations on Aug. 15 and the company shut down its main internal network for more than a week.
Shamoon spread through the company’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean. Saudi Aramco said damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might hurt technical operations.
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