US offshore oil and gas installation at 'increasing' risk of cyberattack

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has warned that the time to act on securing the US's offshore oil and natural gas installations is now because they are under "increasing" and "significant risk" of cyberattack. Docked offshore oil drilling rig in the port of Galveston, Texas. Docked offshore oil drilling rig in …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Some cybersecurity tips

Do not have your monitors set to 16char x 4line mode with sci-fi font

Change the password from "Swordfish"

Absolute zero must be maintained in the boiling clouds of coolant for the mainframe

Do not connect every terminal to the automatic destruct system

If any British guy in a suit turns up - don't let him in / throw him overboard / ideally shoot him and then throw him overboard

[Kev99]

Right. Let's put all of our mission critical, confidential, proprietary, operational data out on the bunch of holes held together with bts of string. It's perfectly safe. And it's FREE!!

[Youngone]

The point the GAO is trying to make is a little bit lost in the details, but it amounts to the fact that the oil and gas industry is important to America, but is not very profitable to the companies that run it, so what they need is an injection of taxpayers money to help them solve their security problems.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

And it's FREE!!

Free and in 'dumb' :-)

[Version 1.0]

The Cold war never ended

The US and other countries declared the winning of the Cold War in 1991 ... but in fact it's still running along. In fact most countries in the world are now at 'increasing' risk of cyberattack these days from a few other suspected but undocumented countries via the Internet.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

It's a shame . . .

. . . that the oil and gas industry is struggling so greatly in these trying times, otherwise they could afford to implement more rigorous security protocols and procedures.

/sarc

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like someone's setting the scene for an environmental and ecological set piece to jack up the price of oil.

[Grunchy]

Just disconnect it from the network

“Why” are these units connected to the internet anyway?

They don’t need to be, so disconnect them & never be hacked again.

* There, I solved it for you.