Following an advisory by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry has alerted all the heads of oil marketing companies (OMCs) about the possibility of cyber attacks.
Asking the heads of OMCs to take immediate counter measures to prevent such a situation from taking place, it has said that, in view of growing attacks on websites, the CERT has advised website administrators to follow best practices to secure web applications and web servers. CERT is tracking the defacement of the Indian websites on a regular basis and has drawn up a list of website defacements depicting domain wise and network wise break-up of the websites defaced in the recent months, the top hackers who have indulged in this activity and vulnerabilities which are largely exploited.
The circular to this effect has been issued by Maninder Singh, Director (Vigilance) in the Petroleum Ministry.
It is also understood that some private players have also drawn up plans to isolate the operations of their refineries, oil and gas installations, exploration and production and take counter measures to prevent any such situation from occurring in future. “We have informally conveyed this to the private sector organisations. Elaborate counter cyber security measures are being put in place by the public sector oil refineries, companies like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and other OMCs to prevent hackers from sabotaging their operations in future,” a senior Ministry official said.
The threat of cyber attacks to oil and gas installations in India has increased tremendously after Saudi Arabia national oil company Saudi Aramco was attacked last August , which impacted its network services and 30,000 work stations.
