Oil India Limited (OIL registered )’s headquarters in Duliajan, Assam’s Dibrugarh district, has been hit by the “biggest cyberattack in recent years.”
“It is a virus, it is a fairly severe and strong virus. It has impacted some of our servers — restoration will take some time. We are also taking the help of external experts,” OIL spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika told.
In addition, he said that there had been no data breach thus yet. “This is perhaps the biggest attack that we have faced in recent years.”
Moreover, according to Dibrugarh Superintendent of Police (SP) Shwetank Mishra the hackers demanded a ransom of 196 Bitcoins, or almost Rs 60 crore.
When asked if any data had been compromised, he said, “Details are being worked out, as of now it is just known that a ransomware attack has been carried out.”
Meanwhile, the Duliajan Police Station has received an FIR for extortion under several sections of the Information Technology Act and Section 385 of the Indian Penal Code.
However, the source of the attack is currently being investigated by the police.
OIL cyber attack in One workstation of G&R Department
The cyberattack occurred on 10 April, according to OIL’s police complaint, on “one of the work stations of the G&R (Geology and Reservoir department) departments.”
According to the OIL’s complaint, “After their preliminary investigation, it came to their notice that OIL’s network, server, and clients PCs are facing network outage.”
“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.”
However, OIL spokeswoman Hazarika, on the other hand, downplayed the ransom demand.
“These are standard tactics of hackers who use ransomware to intimidate the target entities,” he said.
Moreover, according to Hazarika, the virus infected a few machines, which were then disconnected from the LAN connection.
So yet, no data breach has occurred, according to the spokeswoman.
“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,” he said.
Further, he added, “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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