Oil India HQ Hit With Massive Cyberattack, Hackers Demands Rs 60 Crore In Bitcoin

According to OIL India spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika, there’s been no data breach in the attack, which seemed to have taken place on April 10. The source of the Oil India HQ attack, which was hit with massive cyberattack followed by hackers demanding Rs 60 crore in bitcoin, is still being investigated by police.

The registered headquarters of state-run Oil India Limited (OIL) in Duliajan, Assam’s Dibrugarh district, is under assault from the “biggest cyberattack in recent years.”

“It is a virus, it is a fairly severe and strong virus. It has impacted some of our servers — restoration will take some time. We are also taking the help of external experts,” OIL spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika informed the media, going on to add that no data breaches had occurred thus far. “This is the biggest attack that we have faced in recent years,” reports The Print.

Shwetank Mishra, Superintendent of Police (SP) in Dibrugarh, stated that hackers demanded an extortion money of 196 Bitcoins, which would be roughly Rs 60 crore.

When inquired if any information had already been compromised, he responded, “details are being worked out, as of now it is just known that a ransomware attack has been carried out.”

The Duliajan Police Station has received a FIR under numerous sections of the Information Technology Act and Section 385 of the Indian Penal Code, that also relates with extortion.

The origin of the attack is still being investigated by police.

‘No data breach, huge financial loss’

According to OIL’s police report, the cyberattack occurred on 10 April on “one of the work stations of the G&R (Geology and Reservoir department) departments.”

“After their preliminary investigation, it came to their notice that OIL’s network, server, and clients PCs are facing network outage,” OIL’s complaint, which the media was able to obtain, reads. “Further, it also came to their notice that, the cyber attacker has demanded 7500000 USD (roughly Rs 57 crore) as a ransom through a note from the infected PC.”

OIL spokesperson Hazarika, on the other hand, downplayed the ransom demand.

“These are standard tactics of hackers who use ransomware to intimidate the target entities,” he said.

According to Hazarika, the virus corrupted a few computers, which were then disconnected from the LAN connection.

Thus far, no data leak has occurred, according to the spokesperson.

“Our operations, the key elements of our day-to-day activities — drilling, and production operations have not been impacted at all… The ERP platform, which we use for our business transactions, is also up and running,” he said. “We are just taking some time to activate all the desktops, which, as a precautionary measure, we had removed from our systems.”

Within the complaint, the firm claims that the public sector endeavor has “incurred a huge financial loss” as a result of the disruption to their business transactions, but this does not quantify the damage.