Last Updated on May 24, 2015
Yesterday Saudi Aramco issued a public statement declaring to have fixed most damage and restored all its main internal network services affected by the Cyber Attack occurred on August 15, 2012 (or a “malicious virus” to quote the same term used by the company).
In the same statement, the company has unveiled the real entity of the attack, confirming what was reported in my original blog post: the malicious virus originated from external sources and affected about 30,000 workstations (on a total of 40,000).
The light at the end of the Cyber Tunnel seems quite close, since the company has stated that the workstations have been cleaned and restored to service. There are however some restrictions still in place: as a precaution, remote Internet access to online resources is still restricted and the website aramco.com is offline showing a courtesy page in which the company confirms that all the electronic systems are isolated from outside access.
You will probably remember that the attack occurred nearly in contemporary with the discovery of the latest malware in Middle East, Shamoon, tailored for targeting companies belonging to the Energy Sector, which had consequently put in close relationship with the cyber attack to Saudi Aramco. At the beginning, security researchers believed to have found a brand new cyber weapon in Middle East, but some coding errors found inside the malicious program have convinced the community that Shamoon is not the work of experienced cyber weapons programmers (anyway I believe that if Shamoon is really the source of the troubles for Saudi Aramco, 30,000 erased computers are a respectable results for a team of amateur programmers).
But if the situation is close to normal, hackers all over the world continue to threaten the company: a couple of days ago, an isolated group posted a new menace to Aramco, announcing a new attack for the 25th of August, at 21:00 GMT.Even if the website of aramco.com is still offline, this does not seem the effect of the latest alleged cyber attack: the hackers have posted today, Monday 29 August (sic), a new statement containing the result of their action (several password of internal router and a couple of accounts) but it appears lame and does not seem too much convincing.
