Saudi Aramco CEO: No Critical Systems Affected, We Continue to Fortify IT Security

Although 30,000 of its computers were affected by the cyberattack that targeted the company on August 15, the CEO of Saudi Aramco Khalid A. Al-Falih claimed that none of their critical services or business transactions had been impacted.

Present at a company workshop on cybersecurity, Al-Falih has told the audience that the organization has been aware of the fact that IT poses great risks, which is why they've continually fortified their networks with “rigorous protection technologies.”

“We had in place the processes and systems to manage, as well as sufficient incident response and business continuity plans to deal with the ramifications,” he explained.

“Built-in system architecture and protections for the primary components of our computer network, including firewalls and segmentation, meant that all our core operations continued smoothly.”

He has once again highlighted the fact that any company can become a target of cyberattacks, which is why he stressed the importance of a strong collaboration, Zawya reports.

Saudi Aramco took this opportunity to tell others, such as Microsoft and McAfee, the details of the attack with the purpose of sharing insight on incidents of such magnitude.

The hackers claim that they’ve managed to penetrate the company’s systems once again on August 25, but according to Saudi Aramco’s manager of information protection and technology planning, the response systems and the contingency plans they had in place allowed them to address the issue in a timely manner in order to avoid the disruption of the business workflow.

In the meantime, Qatar’s RasGas – world’s second largest liquefied natural gas company - also suffered from a similar attack at the end of August. There are few details regarding this second incident and it’s unknown if the two are connected in any way.