Iran’s oil sector has been targeted with a nefarious virus. The attack was so severe that the authorities were forced to unplug the entire oil export terminal system. A cyber crisis team has been set up which will look into the matter and try to resolve it as soon as possible.
The severity of the said ‘cyber attack’ can be gauged from the fact that Iranian authorities had to immediately unplug the system to save the data on it. However, even then, some of the data may have been compromised as was affirmed by Oil Ministry spokesperson, ‘To say that no data was harmed is not right. Only data related to some of the users have been compromised.’
The Kharg terminal, which was the chief target of the virus, takes care of 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. In a way, if this system is indeed harmed badly enough, it can jeopardize a major part of Iran’s economy.
Iran has good reasons to believe it was an intended cyber attack. This is because Iran is being accused of working on uranium enrichment. And this has been a huge source of discomfort for a lot of countries. Iran has, in the past too, alleged that its governmental systems have been targeted through cyber attacks.
In this current attack, although Iranian authorities are reluctant to admit that any data has been lost, the fact that they unplugged the terminal does make it obvious that data was being sniffed away by the virus and that is precisely why such a drastic action was taken.
[ttjad]
