KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 11): The majority of companies across the US oil and gas industry are at risk of a successful cyber breach.

In a statement on Tuesday (Aug 9), cyber risk rating and monitoring company BreachBits said following an analysis of 98 representative upstream, midstream, downstream and supply chain companies across the energy sector, on average, the oil and gas companies observed were at medium risk, with a score of 4.1 out of 10 on the BreachRisk scale, but that risk was not distributed evenly across the sector.

BreachBits chief executive officer and co-founder John Lundgren said that additionally, 11% of the companies presented potentially serious, high-risk threats.

“We identify and monitor cyber risks at scale as we did here, detect issues and then test them just as a hacker would,” he said.

The study by BreachBits ranked 59% of companies at medium risk for a cyber breach, 13% at low risk and 28% at very low risk.

BreachBits, founded by US military cyberwarfare veterans, measures an organisation’s BreachRisk as the likelihood of a successful breach against the potential impact on the subject.

BreachBits chief operating officer and co-founder J Foster Davis said the firm measures cyber risk based on actual threats and viable attack vectors, not hypothetical ones, and does that from the hacker’s perspective.

“That means the risks we identified in this study are the same observations being made by active cyberattackers.

“What’s different is that we’ve taken those complex assessments and translated them into an easy-to-understand cyber risk score that everyone from the boardroom to the server room can use to better understand, measure and communicate risk,” said Davis.