Oil Industries Warn Of Growing Frequency and Sophistication of Cyber Attacks

This week big names in the oil sectors provided a reminder of the growing threat posed by cyber crime to critical infrastructure.

Attendees at the World Petroleum Congress have been discussing the increasing frequency of sophisticated IT attacks with Ludolf Luehmann, from Shell Energy Europe, warning “If anybody gets into the area where you can control opening and closing of valves, or release valves...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.”

Ross Brewer, vice president and managing director for international markets, LogRhythm (UK), has made the following comments:

“These warnings from the defence and oil sectors provide yet another indication of the challenges we face in protecting critical infrastructure in an increasingly connected world. Traditional perimeter security solutions, such as anti-virus software, are unfortunately an inadequate defence against these advanced threats, and will not stop sophisticated hacks aimed at gaining control of critical systems.

“While the recent news that a water pump was physically destroyed by hackers may have turned out to be a false alarm, the threat to control systems like SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is very real. The recent discovery of the Duqu virus clearly demonstrated the advanced methods being used to steal data required to infiltrate and attack these kinds of systems.

“To prevent hackers from penetrating systems undetected, organisations need to employ Protective Monitoring that can continuously analyse equipment audit logs, in order to get the earliest possible warning of any anomalous activity across their networks. In order to subvert this approach, hackers have to simultaneously break into their target, control systems like SCADA for example, and into the log management system to modify specifically the pieces they were looking for – a very difficult if not impossible task. By adding these additional levels of protection, organisations can identify anomalies in real-time and immediately remediate any cyber threats.”