14 DAY TRIAL // Back in February, we learned that a number of oil rigs and platforms had been targeted by cyberattacks which, in some cases, even managed to knock systems offline. Oil and gas companies have begun to realize that computer security is not something that should be taken lightly and some of them have already started doing something about it.
One of these organizations is Exxon Mobil, the Texas-based multinational oil and gas corporation that’s the second-largest publicly traded company in the world.
Its CEO, Rex Tillerson, has told FuelFix that the company has started taking cyber security just as seriously as the security of physical operations.
“At the end, it all comes back to people, regardless of how great the technology is and regardless of how much the technology enables us to do things without the human hand maybe touching as much,” Tillerson noted.
Malware and cyberattacks in general have become highly sophisticated. With enough resources, cybercriminals can breach almost any network.
As F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen explained some time ago, advanced malware, such as Stuxnet or Flame, is like James Bond – if they want to “kill you,” they will “kill you.”
However, the success of many targeted cyberattacks relies on a certain degree of social engineering and the exploitation of human weaknesses, which is why it’s important for organizations to focus on this aspect of security if they want to protect themselves.
It appears that Exxon Mobil is well aware of this.
“When you introduce new technology, it still has to be managed by people, so people have to understand that technology. They have to understand its capabilities and, more importantly, they have to understand its limitations,” Tillerson told FuelFix.
“So as technology continues to be advanced and introduced into everything that we do, whether it’s computer-related or some other capability, people are still the interface with that technology. So you have to continue to manage the person.”