The Financial Times looks at cyber threats around the Energy industry: “In May, the US Department of Homeland Security revealed that the industrial control system of a public utility had been hacked by a ‘sophisticated threat actor.'”  

“The department – or rather its industrial control systems cyber emergency response team (ICS-CERT) – did not reveal the type of utility. But access to the control system of a power company could give hackers the ability to switch off parts of the electrical grid, while access to a water utility’s control system could allow them to interrupt water supplies.”  

The piece continues: “Energy is an obvious battleground. The Stuxnet computer worm attack impaired Iranian uranium centrifuges in 2010. The 2012 attacks on Saudi Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas aimed to stall production and occurred within days of each other. Some 30,000 Aramco computers were compromised. If an industrial systems administrator’s personal computer or mobile were hit, it could open the way to the pumps, valves and junction boxes of the system concerned.”