By Daniel Ventre
The past decade may be portrayed as a period of growing cyber threats, or at least as a period of increasing fear and a growing conviction regarding cyber insecurity. Among many different cyber-vulnerable industries, critical infrastructure in the energy sector is paramount in facing new risks and threats due to the connection and interdependence of their information systems with the open internet.
Cyberspace has become a major potential landscape of insecurity, and both experts and governments admit that critical infrastructures, which include electric power transmission systems, water distribution systems, and oil-gas distribution systems are susceptible to cyber attacks. Some of the more startling issues that have surfaced are:
* Chinese and Russian infiltration of the US electricity grid
* In 2009, the U.S oil companies Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips were the targets of cyber attacks. Data was leaked as a result of cyber espionage, and the perpetrators could have been Chinese hackers.
* In February 2010, the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was the victim of fraudulent cyber attacks. The registries in 13 European countries were forced to close.
* According to a recent survey by McAfee, “the most victimized sector was oil and gas, where two thirds of executives report distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks”. Twenty-seven percent in the power sector and thirty-one percent in the oil and gas sectors reported being victim of extortion through cyber attacks. TT
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