(Calgary) The Canadian oil company Suncor Energy confirmed on Monday that it had been the victim of a cyberattack.
The Calgary-based energy giant said in a press release on Sunday evening that it had “experienced a cybersecurity incident.”
Suncor provided no further details about the type of attack or which parts of its business were affected.
However, over the weekend, social media users complained about the inability to use credit or debit cards at the company’s chain of Petro-Canada gas stations, as well as difficulties access to car wash services.
The CEO of Vancouver-based cybersecurity firm Plurilock Security, Ian Paterson, said as of Friday he was also hearing from Suncor employees not being able to log into their own internal accounts.
Mr. Paterson stressed that several things remained unknown about the attack and its impact, while adding that his first reading of the situation was that it was not a minor data breach.
Petro-Canada posted a Twitter message on Saturday saying the company’s Petro-Points app and website were temporarily unavailable.
“All of this together seems to suggest that there could be a significant cyber incident occurring,” Paterson said.
“I think it could actually be (a Canadian version of the) Colonial Pipeline, just in the sense that Suncor is such a big part of the economy. »
In 2021, a ransomware attack successfully targeted the Colonial Pipeline, the largest network of refined petroleum products pipelines in the United States. It was the largest cyberattack on oil infrastructure in U.S. history and forced the company to temporarily halt pipeline operations.
In Canada, there has been no successful large-scale cyberattack against a national oil and gas company, although cybersecurity experts have warned for years that the country’s energy industry is an attractive target for cybercriminals.
This includes both financially motivated cybercriminals, such as ransomware hackers, as well as state-sponsored hackers seeking to create geopolitical chaos.
“This has the potential to be very, very serious for Suncor, and that’s hardly a surprise,” Paterson said.
“The cybersecurity industry as a whole, and certainly federal and other governments, have been sounding the alarm for many years that critical infrastructure in particular is vulnerable. »
The company clarified that there was also no evidence that customer, supplier or employee data was compromised or misused.
Suncor said Sunday that “certain transactions with customers and suppliers” may be affected as the company works to resolve the situation. She also said she notified the appropriate authorities of the incident.
Mr. Paterson noted that in the best-case scenario, Suncor will have detected the breach quickly. But he added that it was also possible that the company could take a very long time to resolve the problem.
“The problem here is that it’s such a large company with multiple subsidiaries with such an extensive set of services,” he explained.
“If the threat actor has been around and has been around for a long time, it could take a long time to root them out. »
