In a brief statement, the Italian oil and gas contractor Saipem informed of a cyber attack on 10 December, primarily affecting its servers in the Middle East. The company, which is a subsidiary of the Italian oil major Eni, became the latest wide-known maritime organization to have been affected by a cyber breach.
Saipem’s head of digital and innovation, Mauro Piasere, told Reuters the attack had originated in Chennai, India. While the attack left its main operating centers in Italy, France and Britain unaffected, there has been an impact on servers in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
We are collecting all the elements useful for assessing the impact on our infrastructures and the actions to be taken to restore normal activities. We are also in the process of notifying the report of the incident to the competent Authorities,
…the company informed.
Mr. Piasere was also quoted as saying that there had been no loss of data, as the organization is using backups.
In what is considered as the latest widely-known cyber attack on a maritime company, Australian shipbuilder Austal, which constructs ships for the Royal Australian Navy, the US Navy and the Royal Navy of Oman, was hit by a cyber attack at its data management systems in Perth, in late October. Following the breach, the hackers demanded money from the company in return for the stolen data, but the impact was not major.