Aramco Says Cyberattack Was Aimed at Production
a Group of hackers used a computer virus known as Shamoon in attack. Shamoon spread through Aramco’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean.
By REUTERS DEC. 9, 2012
Date: 01 April 2013
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) — Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, said on Sunday that a cyberattack against it in August that damaged some 30,000 computers was aimed at stopping oil and gas production in Saudi Arabia, the biggest exporter in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The attack on Saudi Aramco — which supplies a tenth of the world’s oil — failed to disrupt production, but was one of the most destructive hacker strikes against a single business.
“The main target in this attack was to stop the flow of oil and gas to local and international markets and thank God they were not able to achieve their goals,” Abdullah al-Saadan, Aramco’s vice president for corporate planning, said on Al Ekhbariya television. It was Aramco’s first comments on the apparent aim of the attack.
Hackers from a group called Cutting Sword of Justice claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that their motives were political and that the virus gave them access to documents from Aramco’s computers, which they threatened to release. No documents have yet been published.
Aramco and the Saudi Interior Ministry are investigating the attack. A ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, said the attackers were an organized group operating from countries on four continents.
The attack used a computer virus known as Shamoon, which infected workstations on Aug. 15. The company shut its main internal network for more than a week. General Turki said the investigation had not shown any involvement by Aramco employees. He said he could not give more details because the investigation was not complete.
Shamoon spread through Aramco’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean. Aramco said damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might harm technical operations.
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Based on this case study, classify the behavior of this crime according to the following classes:
* Automation level
Attack divided into manual, automatic and semi-automatic, so Aramco is automatic because automatic means the speed of the attacks or and that is refers to a system requiring minimum input from the attacker, even with regards to target selection, in this case shamoon virus damaged some 30,000 computers the virus was fast.
“Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, said on Sunday that a cyberattack against it in August that damaged some 30,000 computers”
By: Ahwaq Almadi
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* Effect
First of all Effect is refers to the impact of an attack. In our case the effects is Minor it's because to recoverable damage ”Shamoon spread through Aramco's network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean. Aramco said damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might harm technical operations” (Reutersdec.2012). Because the damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software of Aramco that might harm technical operations.
By: Sarah Almarhabi
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* Scope
Refers to the size and type of entity that is targeted. In this case we chose government Network: refers to networks controlled by the government, because Aramco was private company and now it's become government company that headed by the crown prince,
crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
By: Alaa Mushayt
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* Target
A targeted attack is any malicious attack that is targeted to a specific individual, company, system or software. It may be used to extract information, disturb operations, infect machines or destroy a specific data type on a target machine.
Target in Case study: Software and Hardware.
- Software “that their motives were political and that the virus gave them access to documents from Aramco’s computers”.
- Hardware “Shamoon spread through Aramco’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean”.
By: Ghadi Alghamdi
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* Vulnerability
In PC security is a weakness, which permits an attacker to reduce a system's information assurance.
Based on the given case study, we couldn't find the vulnerability of this attack. I was asked for by the teacher to look online to find that weakness. When I look about the virus name led in this attack "Shammon", it target part based renditions of Microsoft Windows. In this way vulnerability type is "Implementation" that impact the framework code.
Based on the given case study, we couldn't find the vulnerability of this attack. I was asked for by the teacher to look online to find that weakness. When I look about the virus name led in this attack "Shammon", it target part based renditions of Microsoft Windows. In this way vulnerability type is "Implementation" that impact the framework code.
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