The Cyber Threat To the Global Oil Supply

Lasrick writes "Blake Clayton has an excellent piece on the cyber threat to the global oil supply. His description of the August attack on Saudi Aramco, which rendered thirty thousand of its computers useless, helps make his point. From the article: 'The future of energy insecurity has arrived. In August, a devastating cyber attack rocked one of the world’s most powerful oil companies, Saudi Aramco, Riyadh’s state-owned giant, rendering thirty thousand of its computers useless. This was no garden-variety breach. In the eyes of U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta, it was “probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date.”'"

Comments

Who Blake Clayton is

[Animats]

This guy is not a security expert. His bio: "Before joining the Council, I was a sell-side commodity strategist at Louis Capital Markets." That's a brokerage firm. A "sell-side analyst" is really a PR guy who generates happy-talk "buy" recommendations which are sent to customers.

Re:"private sector"

[fast turtle]

and of that $8 per U.S. Gallon, 50 percent or more is parlimentary taxes. If you reduce the tax rate per gallon to what we pay in the United States, which is $0.14 cents, you'd understand why we are pissed at the Oil Companies because of the price of fuel, 90 percent of it goes to the oil company and every chance they get, they push the price up and tell us we're lucky we aint paying the same as in the EU and the rest of te world. No We aint because if we were, then the current $4.00 per gallon cost in my area would mean we're actually paying $2.00 per gallon for product with the remainder being taxes.