Published in News

Another oil company gets hit by hackers

by on31 August 2012



RasGas offline

Hackers are going for the major middle eastern oil companies. After Saudi Aramco was bought to its knees this week it seems that it is now the turn of Qatari firm RasGas, has been knocked offline by a virus attack.

RasGas’s corporate web site was unreachable Thursday and e-mail sent to RasGas e-mail addresses bounced. According to arabianoilandgas.com, “an unknown virus has affected” the company’s office systems since Monday, August 27. RasGas is the second largest producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the world.

RasGas has notified its suppliers by fax that the company is “experiencing technical issues with its office computer systems,” ArabianOilandGas.com reported. The company’s LNG production and distribution operations were unaffected. Saudi Aramco was shut down by a group called the Cutting Sword of Justice. It was in retaliation for what the group said was the Al-Saud regime’s support of “crimes and atrocities” in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and other countries.

That used malware called Shamoon which was designed to partially destroy data on the hard drives of systems it infected. It is unclear if Shamoon was used in the RasGas attack.

Rate this item
(0 votes)