Oil India's Duliajan HQ under cyberattack, perpetrators demand $7.5 million ransom

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Oil India Limited (OIL), the Indian-government-owned oil and gas extraction company has reportedly been a victim of a cyberattack, as the cyber attacker demanded $7500000 (roughly Rs 57 crore) as a ransom through a note from the infected PC.

OIL's Duliajan headquarters in Assam was the target of the attack, and the company says it has shut down all affected systems and was working to resolve the issue as quickly as it could.

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"We detected the outages in our computers on Sunday. As per protocol, we disabled our systems as a precautionary measure," OIL spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika told the Express-News Agency.

Hazarika said that the attack had impacted "some servers and computers" but there haven't been any alarming discoveries regarding data theft yet.

According to the police complaint, the cyberattack took place on 10 April on one of the work stations of the G&R (Geology and Reservoir department) departments.

"After their preliminary investigation, it came to their notice that OIL’s network, server, and clients PCs are facing network outage," ThePrint quoted OIL’s complaint. "Further, it also came to their notice that, the cyber attacker has demanded 7500000 USD (roughly Rs 57 crore) as a ransom through a note from the infected PC." Meanwhile, OIL spokesperson Hazarika played down the ransom demand.

"The IT department is yet to ascertain the extent of the damage. OIL is working on solving the issue. Previously too OIL faced such problems, but this time it seems to be a major IT-related crisis which will take time to resolve," Hazarika told news agency, PTI.

He further added that currently no computer within the premises had access to the internet, and all the systems connected with a LAN, have been taken offline till the damage is ascertained.

"Our operations, the key elements of our day-to-day activities — drilling, and production operations have not been impacted at all… The ERP platform, which we use for our business transactions, is also up and running," Hazarika  said, adding, "We are just taking some time to activate all the desktops, which, as a precautionary measure, we had removed from our systems."

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Hazarika said that the company was taking help from internationally-renowned security experts. OIL is focusing on restoring connections to the computers in a, "phasewise" manner and added that the attack had not disrupted drilling activities, which are going on as normal.

Recently, the twitter account of UP's CMO office was hacked for nearly 30 minutes, with the hackers posting 400-500 tweets from the account before it was suspended by twitter, on grounds of unnatural activity.