Saudi Aramco cyber-attack (2012) COMPROMISES Saudi Aramco

“Saudi Aramco. You may not ever have heard of Saudi Aramco before and neither did I until I started researching this story and that’s because they don’t sell to consumers. Instead they sell to manufacturers and distributors so what do they do? Saudi Aramco is one of the largest oil and natural gas producers in the world. It controls massive amounts of oil reserves. It drills it and ships it all over the world. Saudi Aramco may be the most profitable company in existence and produces 25% of the global oil. It’s not a publically trading company though, so we really don’t know how much it’s worth. Because Saudi Aramco is huge and operating globally, it has a lot of computers. There are pump stations, plants, shipping terminals, logistics centers, laboratories, research and development centers, and storage facilities. Let’s not forget the teams it takes to run it. There’s an HR department, IT department, marketing, truck drivers, mechanics, engineers, public relations, finance, drilling teams, and advisors. Add all that up and Saudi Aramco has over 50,000 employees. Imagine how many computers there are at a company that has 50,000 employees. Not only do a lot of them have individual computers to work on but there’s a lot of servers; domain controllers, e-mail servers, SharePoint systems, files servers, and more. In 2012 Saudi Aramco had over 40,000 computers in their network worldwide. Now I say 2012 because that was when the most profitable company in the world was hit with the most devastating cyber-attack any company has ever seen.”