Aramco says it is under increasing cyberattack

Reuters quoted the information security office of Saudi Aramco as confirming the increase in the number of cyber attacks on the company since the last quarter of last year.

The company’s chief information security officer, Khaled Al-Harbi, said that Aramco has also been subjected to an unsuccessful hacking attempt through a malicious program called “Emotate”, and that the company has so far succeeded in countering all cyberattacks it was exposed to.

The Saudi official confirmed that determining the source of the electronic attacks was the most difficult aspect for the Office of Information Security, and that the company believes that these attacks will continue.

Al-Harbi said that there are attempts to infiltrate Aramco through the malicious program "Emotite", which was active around the world, but it was overcome, noting that this program also harmed a number of small organizations in Saudi Arabia. Without further clarification.

And Saudi Arabia is exposed to a lot of electronic infiltration attempts, including what was done using the "Shimon" virus, which paralyzes computers by scanning their disks. The Shimon attacks targeted Saudi ministries and petrochemical companies, the last of which was in 2017.

Saudi security officials said in 2017 that their country was a target of a large-scale cyber espionage campaign that was discovered to include five countries in the Middle East and a number of countries outside the region.

Aramco, which pumps 10% of the world's oil supplies, faced the largest cyber infiltration in its history in August 2012, when an attack using the "Chamoun" virus destroyed nearly thirty thousand computers, and the aim of that attack was to stop oil and gas production in Saudi Arabia.

Aramco facilities were also attacked by drones and missiles in September 2019, which caused a temporary halt to the production of about 5.7 million barrels of oil per day, which represents more than 5% of global oil supplies, and the United States held Iran responsible for this attack, but Tehran denied this.