Saudi Arabia’s state oil giant Aramco has reportedly acknowledged a data leak incident after hackers demanded $50 million in ransom.
The data leak likely came from one of Saudi Aramco’s contractors, said reports.
In a statement, the company has confirmed that it “recently became aware of the indirect release of a limited amount of company data which was held by third-party contractors.”
However, the oil firm did not name which contractor found itself affected nor explained how the information leaked.
“We confirm that the release of data was not due to a breach of our systems, has no impact on our operations and the company continues to maintain a robust cybersecurity posture,” Aramco said.
According to a report by the Associated Press, a darknet web page it had accessed revealed that 1TB of Saudi Arabian Oil data had been held by an extortionist. The page reportedly offered the oil giant a chance to have the data deleted for $50 million in cryptocurrency. It remains unclear who is behind the cyber-attack.
This is not the first time that the state oil giant has been a target of a cyber-attack. In 2012, Saudi Aramco was hit by the Shamoon computer virus, which partially wiped or totally destroyed thousands of the company’s hard drives. The incident forced Aramco to shut down its network and destroy over 30,000 computers.
