Offshore Energies UK reported “drone sightings near offshore energy structures” in April. “Our platforms are 100, 150 miles out in the middle of the sea, so you don’t typically have many neighbors — you don’t have people coming and visiting unless they have a very good reason,” Graham Skinner, the trade body’s health and safety manager for offshore infrastructure, told the BBC.
“When crews observe lights in the sky, or things moving around, suspicious activity in general — it’s very obvious that it’s out of place. It may well be that they want to expose weaknesses or test our responses, they may even just be filming to see what is going on.”
Drones loitering around essential offshore infrastructure: That’s a concerning situation. It’s not just a one-time or unique incident affecting the oil and gas sector. Recently, drones have been seen around various land facilities, including arms factories. On a cold day in January, someone sabotaged power cables in Berlin, leaving around 100,000 residents without power, heat, and internet for days.
There have also been arson attacks against warehouses, shopping malls, and even defense companies. Attempts to bring down airliners using parcel bombs, continuous cyberattacks, and a series of suspicious incidents involving ships and undersea cables have occurred. On June 15, Finnish prosecutors charged the captain and another officer on the Fitburg – the ship that struck cables in the Gulf of Finland on New Year’s Eve – with aggravated sabotage and aggravated interference with communications networks.
Companies experiencing numerous disruptive activities should not be surprising. Businesses are crucial to the daily functionality of our societies, making them attractive and vulnerable targets. Police and military cannot guard their installations around the clock.
In global insurance broker Willis Towers Watson’s recently released annual risk survey, 26 percent of European companies listed grey-zone attacks by Russia as a significant concern. When asked about the type of grey-zone acts they were worried about, 65 percent cited attacks on infrastructure, 61 percent economic coercion or retaliation, 56 percent state-sponsored cyberattacks, 39 percent hostile export controls, 37 percent marine disruption – such as attacks on shipping or port blockages – and 32 percent threats to business executives, like wrongful detention or assassination attempts.
Leave a Reply