Plight of the U.S. Oil Company: Cyberattacks, China and More
Western oil and gas companies, already wrestling with technological, regulatory and political challenges, can now add Chinese hackers to the list. Security vendor McAfee (MFE) revealed hackers in China have been successfully stealing information from oil and gas companies since at least November 2009.
Allegations of cyber attacks from China aren't new, as BNET's Erik Sherman notes. But this latest attack stands out because it involves the two things Americans fear and can't seem to control: China and our oil and gas supply.
McAfee doesn't say if the Chinese government was at the root of the cyberattacks. That hardly matters. All we need to know is the hackers went after proprietary data about operations as well as financial information on projects and bids for oil and gas leases. Who else would want this information except the Chinese government? (Or its state-owned oil companies?)
After all, China's energy appetite is well chronicled here at BNET and elsewhere. Chinese oil and gas companies have made aggressive acquisitions and government has made a slew of loans-for-oil deals with countries in need of cash. More recently, China has smartly has sought out joint ventures, not takeovers, to avoid the kind of nationalistic ruckus that erupted when it attempted to buy U.S.-owned Unocal in 2005. For example, just this week PetroChina bought half of Encana's holdings in a Canadian shale gas region for $5.4 billion, the largest foreign gas deal by a Chinese company, according to Reuters.
Who is doing the stealing is only secondary to the bigger issue for the oil industry. The hackers were after the kind of highly sensitive information that can make or break multi-billion dollar deals in this extremely competitive industry, McAfee's George Kurtz noted in a blog post. The idea that China's behind it might make it scarier for some, but it doesn't change the outcome.
Photo from Flickr user peruisay, CC 2.0
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