Cyber threat to Aust Resources Companies

[Jovial Monk]

Latest threat is to resource firms from anywhere:

Australia warns on cyber attacks on resource firms

Government hosts high-level meeting with banks and mining giants.

Australia's government has urged companies to tighten vigilance over cyber attacks launched offshore against some of the world's biggest resource firms and other businesses, warning high-tech threats were intensifying.

The call for greater vigilance by Attorney-General Robert McClelland came after the outgoing head of Australia's biggest oil and gas company, Woodside Petroleum, said cyber hacking attacks were now coming "from everywhere".

"There is no doubt that cyber-security threats are becoming worse," McClelland told Reuters on the sidelines of a cyber security conference in Canberra.

"Without talking about specific incidents, there have been a number of reports concerning our resource companies," McClelland said.

Outgoing Woodside chief executive Don Voelte told a business conference in Perth on Friday that cyber attacks were a major concern in resource powerhouse Australia, and were not just coming from energy hungry China.

"It comes from everywhere. It comes from eastern Europe; it comes from Russia. Just don't pick on the Chinese; it's everywhere," Voelte was quoted as saying in a report in the Australian newspaper on Monday.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/259042,au ... firms.aspx

Two good comments to the above:

BaysNet
May 31, 2011 8:25 AM
While we wouldn't want to offend our good customers who "allegedly" sponsor cyber attacks it's true the attacks do come form everywhere as the money to be made from selling the information obtained back to our good customers is probably more than the average hacker would get from a phishing scam for credit cards which are now so freely available thanks to our good firends Sony there is not as much money in that any more.

M

axxi2
May 31, 2011 10:05 AM
If you can get hold of internal pricing and costings docs from some Oz resource companies, then they could be worth $billions to resource product buyers in purchaing contract negotiations...

This takes the activity to a whole new level and should not be underestimated.

Useful to keep track of cyber threats.