The head of the cyber security firm Dragos has played down reports of a cyber attack being behind a fire at the Abadan Oil Refinery in Iran, which were published by Reuters on Sunday.
Robert M. Lee said in a blog post that some stories about the fire had linked it to an October 16 report from the US, which quoted government sources as saying that a cyber attack had been carried out against Iran.
The report about the fire said it was was in a canal carrying waste from the oil refinery and was at that time under control.
“Various posts on social media took advantage of the claim to spread the information about the cyber attack and claim that it was “probably” a result of the alleged Iranian attacks on Saudi Aramco,” Lee said.
Lee, a former NSA hacker, said he thought it necessary to issue this post, “to add some context to such events for the purpose of avoiding hype, but to clearly point out a gap in the industrial cyber security community that we have around root cause analysis and the importance of setting forth a strategy across collection, visibility, and detection to ever get to the point where response scenarios can account for such processes”.
In June, Dragos issued a warning about a threat group it baptised Xenotime, which it said had expanded its field of operations from the oil and gas industry to now also target electricity utilities in the US.
Read the article by Sam Varghese in iTWire.