Riyadh (Jang News) Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, has confirmed that the company’s data has been leaked to one of its contractors. According to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a ransom of 50 million (PKR 8.11 billion) has now been demanded from the company for the stolen data. The global oil and gas industry has long been criticized for failing to do so.
In an e-mailed statement, Aramco told British media that the company had recently learned of the theft of limited data held by third-party contractors. The Saudi energy company did not say which contractor. Affected or the contractor has been hacked or the files have been stolen in some other way. “We confirm that the data theft was not caused by a breach of our system, it will not affect our operations and the company maintains cybersecurity,” the company said.
US media had earlier quoted a page on the Dark Net as saying that hackers had one terabyte (one thousand gigabytes) of Armco’s data. The report said the page offered to delete the data in exchange for 5 50 million in cryptocurrency, although it was not immediately clear who was behind it.
