Viruses that target critical and strategic facilities and industries are becoming more rampant. In the recent past, it was revealed that a nefarious malware, Flame, was meant to steal important data from the target machines. Soon after, another malware ‘Shamoon’ was revealed. And now, Saudi Aramco has revealed that it, too, was hit with a huge cyber-attack.
Shamoon malware was identified by security researchers in mid-August. Interestingly, it is precisely the same time when the attack was launched on Saudi Aramco’s network. While there is a very significant possibility that Shamoon was targeted at Aramco’s machines, the company wouldn’t confirm or deny it.
The attack does seem to have wrecked some damage on Aramco’s network. According to the company, 30,000 of its workstations were affected by this attack and that the virus which wrecked all this havoc “originated from external sources.” The company also stated that it had launched an investigation into the matter.
For now, Aramco is claiming that it has been able to purge its workstations of the virus and that normal operations for the internal network have resumed. The virus originally threatened to wipe the data from all these workstations but apparently, the company has contained the damage.
However, one of the company’s main websites is still down; apparently as the aftermath of the attack. So while Aramco claims to have handled the attack fairly well, the virus didn’t go down without taking some toll.
Source: Reuters
Courtesy: Arstechnica
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