ISSUES....
Inside,
confidential, off the record
Inside
Job!
Whew,
Theft of Classified Data in Brazil Was Just an Inside Job!
Petrobras publicly announced two weeks ago (February 14) that it got burglarized.
Brazil's state-controlled giant energy company was prompted to fess up after
Terra Magazine (part of a major news portal) published a scoop, divulging inconclusive
details of an ongoing classified investigation led by the Federal Police "only
few Brazilians knew about so far."
The article
hinted about a presumable case of industrial espionage regarding
important data, which was contained in two notebooks
and a hard-drive missing from a container that left the Campos
basin for the city of Macaé, located almost a hundred miles
away from the port of Rio the Janeiro, where it previously had
made a stop.
The relevance
of the data stored in the equipment was asserted by the author
who argued that the responsible for its transportation
was Halliburton, described as one of the world's largest oilfield
services provider, previously directed by Dick Cheney prior to
his career as "Bush Junior's vice-president."
In a doomed
attempt to keep investigations covert, Petrobras issued an evasive
note to 'clarify' that the equipment was indeed stolen
and did leak important data, but no worries! They had backup. It
also claimed that the theft took place "within the installations
of the corporation that provides specialized services for Petrobras" and
said it happened while that very specialized corporation was guarding
the material, not Petrobras.
The cloaking of such a lucrative subject is certain to trigger
media's scrutiny and speculation. And so, national attention was
steered towards the fog of this mysterious investigation throughout
the last couple of weeks.
Further news updates rectified that the containers had originally
left the Santos basin, location of the recently found Tupi oil
field (estimated to contain at least 5 to 8 billion barrels of
oil equivalent) and the Jupiter gas field (a reserve of natural
gas about the same size of Tupi's).
Petrobras has boasted that future exploration of these two fields
should grant the country energy independence and turn it into a
major international exporter.
Pressing emphasis on the matter sparked a heated debate of diverting
statements, conjectures and opinions, mostly converging to the
impelling hypothesis of industrial espionage. Though Federal Police
still have not ruled out the possibility of a common crime, it
announced that the case seemed almost certain industrial espionage.
A day after matters went public, Info magazine interviewed Fernando
Siqueira, director of Petrobras' Association of Engineers (Apete),
which acknowledged that the company has been a constant target
for data espionage since the discovery of the Tupi oil field, leaking
that two engineers and a geologist had their houses invaded recently,
occasion in which only their notebooks were taken.
Even Brazilian
President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, addressed
the subject as a "threat to national security", demanding
clear and conclusive disclosure from authorities.
But while many
security experts, ministers and columnists warned about the security
flaws of Petrobras, a major oil company in a
world of questionable ethics and procedures, Federal Police specialist
Isaac Morais continued the investigations and publicly concluded
that not only it was a case of petty thief, but a "sloppy
job" to boot.
Further reports
exposed an even bigger conundrum, disclosing that police investigations
began only a week after the crime was reported
on February 1st, allegedly due to the Carnaval celebrations. When
the probe started the crime scene had already been defiled. It
was also disclosed that no depositions had been taken prior to
the publishing of the first exposé.
But since the stolen data had obviously been backed up, the major
economic concern was the impact of the incident on the bidding
of exploration licenses on the Santos basin. The first auction
took place shortly after the Tupi oil field was found and prior
to the confirmation of the Jupiter gas field.
After the news broke and it was confirmed that the stolen equipment
was being used to probe the Santos basin, some sites and newspapers
published that government sources would determine the cancellation
of public auctions and revoke previously conceded licenses.
After eleven
days of intensive and (mostly) contradictory media coverage,
the president of Petrobras, José Sérgio
Gabrielli, finally turned public more conclusive information about
the import data that was stolen.
In an interview at the Petrobras' main office in Buenos Aires,
capital of an Argentina that is going through a major energy crisis
and asks for impossible help, Gabrielli finally disclosed that
the stolen material actually contained encrypted probing data from
the also enormous Jupiter gas field, consisting of four notebooks
and two hard-drives.
When asked about the security procedures of data transmission,
Gabrielli claimed that probing logs are routinely sent through
satellite connections or transferred to external hard-drives in
cases that terabytes are transferred.
In the case of this particular episode, the shipping of notebooks
and desktop computers happened because the whole probe was being
carried ashore, including the violated container which sat on top
of it. He also clarified that bidding for explorations on the gas
field will happen regardless of the incident, which he labeled
as unrelated to the negotiations.
Gabrielli turned out to be luckily right. The Federal Police launched
an operation that resulted in the detention of four suspects, all
of them security guards from the terminal of containers at Poliporto,
in Rio de Janeiro.
The superintendent of Rio's Federal Police, Valdinho Jacinto Caetano,
refuted the possibility of industrial espionage, saying that the
thieves were oblivious to the content of the equipment and they
have also been stealing electronics from the containers since September
of 2007.
Turns out it was petty thief in the end and Isaac Moraes, the
only dissonant voice in the conspiracy choir, was right from the
beginning.
The episode serves at least as a reminder for Petrobras to keep
closer attention to the security procedures and also gave the media
a good two weeks of coverage and a good example of why the press
is so important in a democracy.
-
Daniel M. Cavalcante, a Brazilian journalism student/Brazzil
Magazine
Petroleumworld
News 03/03/08
ISSUES....
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