Pakistani oil and gas sector under attack from Blue Locker ransomware

Oil and gas entities across Pakistan, including Pakistan Petroleum Limited, were disclosed by the country's National Cyber Emergency Response Team to have been compromised by the Blue Locker ransomware gang, resulting in operational disruptions, reports GBHackers News.

Additional cybersecurity defenses have already been activated by other critical infrastructure organizations across Pakistan amid the ongoing threat of Blue Locker ransomware, according to NCERT, which has urged the implementation of multi-factor authentication, offline backups, network segmentation, and other security measures to combat the threat. Malicious emails and attachments, as well as vulnerable remote access, have been leveraged to spread Blue Locker ransomware, which was noted by Resecurity researchers to be associated with Proton ransomware, while having an Iranian or dark web source code origin. Such findings suggest Blue Locker, which has a payload enabling security system bypass, privilege escalation, and persistence, to be akin to the Black Basta and Conti ransomware operations.