Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 30
By Huseyn Valiyev – Trend:
Azerbaijan’s big business companies are not ready to share information about cyber incidents they faced, even during negotiations, Andrey Suvorov, head of Critical Infrastructure Protection Business Development at Kaspersky Lab, the Russian-based multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider, told Trend.
He was commenting on the issue of hacker attacks on Azerbaijan’s industrial facilities.
He said that this topic is semi-closed and not many customers are ready to share information on it.
"When talking about incidents, I would single out three topics. The first topic includes human factor, deliberate or unintentional operator mistakes, the second one includes industrial fraud and the third one - serious cyber attacks, and either criminal groups or states stand behind these attacks,” he said.
In the first case, the most recent event has occurred at a major paper mill in Georgia, the US, where a fired employee organized a cyber attack on an automated process control system, which led to its suspension, Suvorov noted.
“He was sentenced to 34 months of imprisonment for this, and the manufacturer suffered $1.1 million worth of losses,” Suvorov added. “As for the industrial fraud, here, as a rule, knowledge of the automated process control system allows people who work in a company to steal the company’s property, coal or light oil products.”
“Finally, when it comes to serious cyber attacks that paralyze the work of industrial facilities, one can mention an energy operator of Ukraine and the Saudi Arabian Oil Company - Saudi Aramco that faced these attacks last year,” Suvorov said. “This is very dangerous for business of companies of such a level.”