Cybersecurity

Houston FBI Leads New Efforts To Protect Energy Companies From Cyberattacks

The Houston FBI held a classified meeting to help energy companies protect themselves from the growing threat of cyberattacks.

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Deron Ogletree, assistant special-agent-in-charge of the FBI's Houston office, speaks to media during a 2017 press conference. The Houston FBI held a classified meeting to help energy companies protect themselves from the growing threat of cyberattacks.
Credit: Godofredo A. Vasquez/Houston Chronicle.

The Houston FBI held a classified meeting to help energy companies protect themselves from the growing threat of cyberattacks.

Nearly 60 people from energy companies and federal agencies attended the meeting, which included a classified security briefing and panel discussion that focused on protecting pipelines, power lines, refineries, and other facilities from espionage, hackers, and overseas-led cyberattacks.

The meeting was a follow up to an April 2018 cyberattack directed against several natural gas pipelines in the US. Culprits were never publicly named, and no arrests were made, but the FBI and several federal agencies have been working to prevent it from happening again.

Deron Ogletree, assistant special assistant in charge of the FBI's Houston field office, said part of those prevention efforts involve sharing intelligence and classified information with companies. The agency, he said, is concerned about cyberattacks led by a "laundry list of actors" that includes hacktivists, environmentalists, and hostile foreign governments.

"We don't tell these companies how to do business," Ogletree said. "We simply provide them with information that we hope they use to calculate risk."

China, North Korea, and Iran have emerged as state sponsors of cyberattacks on the US but a March 2018 alert from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned about Russia launching an "intrusion campaign" using malware, phishing emails, and other hacking techniques on multiple targets in the energy sector. Three years earlier, Russian hackers used cyberattacks to knock out the power grid in Ukraine in late 2015.

William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said that the United States and its energy sector remain "extremely vulnerable" to cyberattacks.

"Nowhere else in my life have I seen a more critical time and place for a robust, continuous, and vibrant public partnership than I do with the energy sector," Evanina said.

Read the full story here.