The Estonian Cyberwar Shamoon Essay Example

there was no evident oil spillage , explosion neither a gigantic fault within Aramco’s operation but the incident did impact massively the business process as well as the production of the firm since there were major losses of data that are used for drilling and production of oil. This virus Shamoon is also speculated to have been propagated into other networks of other gas and oil firms such as RasGas, which is a joint partnership between US-based ExxonMobil and the Qatar Petroleum. This incident did come after several years in which there had been warnings regarding cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures (Knopova & Eva, 2014). Thus, the protection of petroleum infrastructure of Saudi from terrorists and military attacks had been a concern by the Saudi Arabian government as well as United States of America for most periods of time.

In order to understand the intent of this cyber-attack, it needs to be understood that there has been competition and rivalry between oil producing countries especially in the gulf region. Thu such an attach such as in this case the Aramco did provide significant threats to the petroleum facilities in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia. This attack that has consistently been linked to Iran did thus have a disruption on the facilities of production of oil on Saudi Arabia and this did create an immediate impact on the oil prices and supplies with a knock on effect on the global economy. This kind of cyber-attack did result in the damage of critical infrastructure in the Middle East as its impact was felt worldwide (Valeriano & Maness, 2015).

The Shamoon virus was a self-replicating computer virus that had been

enabled on 15th August 2012 at 11:08am by unknown person or persons and it was supposed to begin overwriting the files on the hard disk of 30, 000 personal computers that were windows-based that belonged to Saudi Aramco. The primary function of this virus was to delete the data in the hard drives. It did acquire its name Shamoon from the malware analysis community who did find a folder by this name set to be executable. This virus was also to disrupt and corrupt files that were on compromised computers by overwriting the master boot record in efforts of rendering the computers unstable. The propagation of this virus Shamoon did appear to be pseudo-random in its nature as it was designed to target specific work stations of the Aramco Employees. The Symantec, W32.Disttrack of this virus did consist of several components (Jensen, 2015). The main component of this virus was the dropper which was the source of the original infection as well as a variety of other modules that were copied or dropped into the computers that were infected. The wiper module was also responsible in destroying the functionalities of the threat while the reporter module did account in reporting the information of infection back to the attacker.

The virus Shamoon, was then released from one of the computer workstations of the firm’s internal network. It had been designed by its creator or creators to be activated at a specific time, thereafter overwrite the files with an American flag burning image that was embedded on it. Thereafter the compromised personal computers were supposed to report regarding the infection to the IP address that had the virus.

There have been suggestions that the insertion of the virus did require somebody who did have the physical access to one of the computers in Aramco network. Due to the highly destructive functionalities of the Shamoon Wiper module virus, any firm that would be infected by the malware would experience operational impacts such as the loss of intellectual property as well as the disruption of critical systems. The actual impact of the firm would vary reckoning on the number as well as the type of the systems that had been impacted (Lewis, 2014).
An unknown group, The Cutting Sword of Justice, did take responsibility of the Shamoon incidence as well as another group that calls itself anti-oppression hacker group did publicly they were the ones behind this hacking and they even did post the I.P addresses of the computers that were affected online. The incentives that have been propagated for this cyber-attack is that Iran was attempting to harm Saudi Arabia by inflicting on its major economic resources. This they did because they have been faced with growing sanctions and they did face the prospects of having their production offline and flat. Thus, the possibility of experiencing antiquations as well as facing decrepit state of their national gas and the oil infrastructure (Bronk & Ringas, 2013). They thus did want to resolve their productions so that the economic sanctions that they had been given would be lifted up.

Iran has consistently employed proxy organizations that do engage in terror attacks against U.S. and its other allies. It has also been supporting terror organizations such as Hezbollah for many years. Since the Saudis have in the past been

effective towards thwarting terror attacks on their own from Iran, the dynamics of the war have now been reshaped and it encompasses the cyber-attacks as the new form of terror in the Arabian Peninsula.

Thus, it can be seen that wars can be fought without the usage of nuclear weapons. The future conflicts will entail cyber-attacks. The strategies that should be sought such as in the case of Shamoon should be to deny the cyber-attacks any form of success by achieving their wider objectives that are supposed to be providing the military advantage by disruption. The best way for this firm to avoid future attacks should be through maintaining the ability of fighting and winning whenever they are attacked. The acquisitions and planning should be based in the assumption that the opponents may attack the networks and here is still the need of the U.S. maintaining and retaining its ability of delivering the services that the assets do provide as well as limiting any form of degradation in its overall performance. The risks and the benefits should also be asymmetric towards favoring the opponent (Valeriano & Maness, 2015). Other strategies and concepts that should be applied are the ones of deterrence as they should be used carefully in neutralizing such similar occasions in the future.
In conclusion, it can be seen that in this 21st century, cyber weapons are going to be definitely used in large swathes with a gradual increase of its amplitude as well as frequency. The usage of cyber-attacks seems to be relatively cheap and for the countries that do have a developed IT sector, it would be hard to find its authors being

proven guilty and also tracking them down would seem an impractical journey as evidenced in the Shamoon case.

References

1. Bronk C. & Ringas T. E. (2013), Hack or Attack? Shamoon and the Evolution of Cyber Conflict
2. Knopova M. & Eva K. (2014), The Third World War? In The Cyberspare. Cyber Warfare in The Middle East
3. Valeriano, B. & Maness, R. C. (2015). Cyber war versus cyber realities: Cyber conflict in the international system.
4. Lewis A. J. (2014). Cyber Security and Stability in the Gulf. Gulf Analysis Paper, Centre for Strategic & International Affairs
5. JENSEN, E. T. (2015). Cyber Sovereignty: The Way Ahead. Texas International Law Journal,