The mystery around a cyberattack that struck Venezuela’s state-owned oil company in December is growing, following an announcement by researchers this week that they had discovered a “highly destructive” wiper program that appears to have been designed to target the oil company and may have been used in the December attack against it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Months before that cyberattack, and before US forces invaded Venezuela to seize then-Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, someone compiled the destructive wiper files and hard-coded the domain of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company \u2013 Petr\u00f3leos de Venezuela, or PDVSA \u2013 into a script used to trigger the wiping operations. The latter was aimed at erasing data and critical files from targeted systems, to render them inoperable. The hard-coded domain ensured that if the malware infected systems on any network outside of the PDVSA domain, it would not wipe their files.<\/p>\n\n\nMystery Around Venezuelan Cyberattack Deepens, with New Discovery of “Highly Destructive” Wiper<\/a>: Mystery Around Venezuelan Cyberattack Deepens, with New Discovery of “Highly Destructive” Wiper<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The mystery around a cyberattack that struck Venezuela’s state-owned oil company in December is growing, following an announcement by researchers this week that they had discovered a “highly destructive” wiper program that appears to have been designed to target the oil company and may have been used in the December…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malware","tag-72"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1000,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/1000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/familiebuckens.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}