At its core, every company has its own set of secrecy and personal data. When we talk about giant conglomerates such as oil companies, their secret data can relate to all their Bidding and Tender Notices. What if a team of Chinese hackers was to steal global oil companies’ data and sell it to their rivals? That’d be kind of itchy, right?

Yesterday, I came across some startling news. It said that a team of hackers from China downloaded all sorts of secret and sensitive data from different oil companies’ corporate network. McAfee, the gallant computer security firm, stepped in and officially released footage about this report.

According to McAfee, these hackers have been breaching oil companies’ computer security since 2009. On their list, some other business sectors, such as; Energy, Environment, Petrochemical and steel industries were also high priority targets.

It took a long time for computer security analysts to crack the codes. They found out that the hackers used different spots in China to carry out their activities. They used high-tech cloaking technology and at times, they’d assume the identity of a U.S. based ISP. From then on, they worked hard to gain access to computers that specifically belonged to high officials from U.S., Greece, Taiwan and Kazakhstan.

George Kurtz, CTO at McAfee said, (Quoted) “The attackers targeted proprietary operations and project-financing information on oil and gas field bids and operations. This information is highly sensitive and can make or break multibillion dollar deals in this extremely competitive industry.”

By the way, McAfee itself hasn’t been doing well lately. Last year, they released an Update, which turned out to be a huge “Oh Sh*t” experience for the company. The so called update, instead of “upgrading” clients’ side McAfee Antivirus, infected them with a series of irritating bugs and self-replicating viruses.