RasGas, the second largest producer of Qatari LNG after Qatar Petroleum, was hit with an “unknown virus” which has taken the company offline.
A RasGas spokesperson confirmed that “an unknown virus has affected its office systems” since Monday 27th August. RasGas confirmed the situation by fax yesterday. “RasGas is presently experiencing technical issues with its office computer systems,” said the RasGas fax seen by Oil & Gas Middle East, dated 28th August. “We will inform you when our system is back up and running.”
Emails to verified addresses at RasGas bounced back with a permanent delivery failure error message. and the RasGas website (www.rasgas.com) is down.
The news follows a malware attack against Saudi Aramco on 15th August which forced the world’s largest oil company to take down its company-wide office systems for 12 days with 30,000 afeected users.
Meanwhile a hacking group has released one million records and accounts from banks, government agencies and other sources. The group, calling itself Team GhostShell posted compromised databases from a Chinese mainframe, a US stock exchange mainframe and access points to three or four Department of Homeland Security servers among other sources. Security analysts have confirmed that the data released includes at least 30,000 records, with data including credit histories from banks, administrator login information, usernames and passwords and files from content management systems.
