Hacker attacks: the oil ports of Northern Europe still hit
After the German company Oiltanking , the hakers hit several other oil infrastructures in the ports of Northern Europe. Operations at the oil terminals of some of Northwest Europe's largest ports have been disrupted by a large-scale cyber attack, AFP reported Thursday .
Antwerp in Belgium, the second largest port in Europe. Rotterdam, the former, and the main German port of Hamburg were among those targeted by the cyber attack.
“There has been a cyber attack on various terminals, some terminals have been disrupted,” Jelle Vreeman, a senior broker at Riverlake, based in Rotterdam, told AFP.
“Their software has been hijacked and they cannot process the cargoes of the barges. Basically, the operating system is down, ”Vreeman added.
With systems inactive, oil terminals are unable to process tankers and barges that unload oil and petroleum products.
Germany's Hamburg and at least six other oil terminals in the Netherlands and Belgium appear to have been hit by the cyber attack, Euronews and AFP reported.
Corporate IT systems are affected by the major trading oil hub Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp, which appears to be a major victim of the cyber attack.
Germany is investigating a cyber attack that targeted oil facilities in what could be a possible ransomware attack, prosecutors told AFP. Europol, the EU police agency, has offered to help the German authorities with their investigation. From some sources it seems that the same BlackCat group is behind it, responsible for the attack on the US Colonial pipeline last year. The attack would not be directly related to Russia, but it may have found one of its instigations from the current international situation.
The disruption of oil terminal operations in major northwestern European ports comes days after a cyber attack on a German oil storage and logistics company disrupted fuel supply chains in Germany, where Shell was forced to redirect supply to alternative depots.
However, the energy infrastructures of Western Europe are proving to be increasingly weak and pierceable by cyber attacks, putting the whole system in danger.
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The article Hacker attacks: oil ports of Northern Europe still hit comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/attacchi-hacker-colpiti-ancora-i-porti-petroliferi-del-nord-europa/ on Fri, 04 Feb 2022 08:00:08 +0000.