The oil and gas industry should brace itself for the increased risk of cyber attacks from hostile states, the former Deputy Director of GCHQ has warned.
Brian Lord OBE said a successful attack on its infrastructure could cause “unprecedented damage” and “unrest across the world.”
With a complex ecosystem of computation, networking, and physical operational processes spread around the world, the industry has a large attack surface with many attack vectors. A typical large oil and gas company uses half a million processors just for oil and gas reservoir simulation and stores petabytes of sensitive and competitive field data.