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How Statoil held off hacker attack last year

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Dissent

It’s always helpful when companies are willing to talk about what happened when they were attacked.

In the wake of yesterday’s report about major Norwegian oil firms being attacked or warned of attacks, Statoil revealed that it was also the target of a massive attack last year. As reported on NewsinEnglish.no:

“It started on March 12,” recalled Statoil IT director Sonja Chirico Indrebø. She told DN that it prompted Statoil to confiscate 40 computers from its employees who hadn’t even noticed that unknown hackers were using them to get around Statoil’s security systems.

The attack involved the hackers’ earlier success at breaking into the website of a well-known international company that gathers data on the oil industry. Statoil declined to identify it, but DN reported that it’s a site Statoil employees regularly log into with a user name and password, to gain access to its exclusive data for which Statoil reportedly pays large sums.

Alarms rang when Statoil’s Intrusion Detection System (IDS) discovered that someone was trying to download code into some of Statoil’s employees’ computers. Statoil’s IT experts then saw that the code tried to enable communication with so-called “black lists,” areas within Statoil’s systems that aren’t related to ordinary business operations.

“Our employees were naturally surprised when we called and told them that we had to confiscate their PCs because we suspected they’d been attacked,” Indrebø told DN. The employees hadn’t noticed anything, but had received a message when logging into the international data website to click on a java page. That set off the process of downloading the dangerous code.

Read more on on NewsinEnglish.no.

Category: Business SectorHackMalwareNon-U.S.

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