After suspected cyber-attack, OIL says production and drilling unaffected

Oil India Limited (OIL) officials have informed that exploration and production work of the company have not been affected in the suspected cyber-attack in its field headquarters in Assam’s Duliajan.

Work in some sections of the company’s offices in Duliajan has been hampered following the incident that was first detected on Sunday afternoon. A police complaint was filed on Tuesday evening.

“Thankfully there has been no impact on our production and drilling activities. These activities, which are not heavily reliant on IT resources, are functioning normally,” said Tridiv Hazarika, PRO of the company.

“The software which handles the key business functions of OIL in Duliajan like payments to vendors and contractors also hasn’t been affected and is functioning as usual,” he added.

On Sunday afternoon, some employees who were working noticed that some computers experienced outages. The IT team, which was informed immediately, detected that it was a malware attack and got those affected computers out from the local area network (LAN).

“There has been a cyber-attack in which some of our systems and few servers in Duliajan office were affected. As a precautionary measure, we are putting some of our systems down and beginning a restoration exercise,” said Hazarika.

“We have employed an international cyber security expert to devise a way to reboot and restore our systems. We are doing it in a phased manner and it should be over in the next 4-5 days,” he added.

Hazarika said the cyber-attack was done by using malicious software to encrypt OIL’s systems. He informed that a case has been lodged with the local police in Duliajan to look into the suspected cyber-attack.

“As a major oil and gas company, OIL is always susceptible to such attacks. Our systems are robust, but once in a while these issues creep up. We want to reassure our stakeholders and shareholders that our data is absolutely secure,” he said.