The whole country is now worried about the specter of cyber attacks that will bring down the electricity grid. Big Oil is worried about another kind of cybersecurity: eavesdropping.
Exxon spent $222,985 last year on security for chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson. The bulk of that went for standard-issue stuff: a car and driver, and residential security. But just over $9,000 apparently went... “for mobile phones and other communications equipment for conducting business in a secure manner.”...
...corporate chieftains—especially globe-trotting oil execs–can’t live in a communications-free bubble, which would explain Exxon’s expenditure on Mr. Tillerson’s secure mobile phones.
“If you’re a high-profile person, you’re going to be a target. Especially for big oil companies, when so many countries want to know what they are thinking, what their strategy is, it makes sense,” says James Andrew Lewis, senior fellow for technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies...
Michael Klare, author of “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy,” says electronic surveillance could touch executives anywhere from Moscow to their home office in suburban Dallas. “It might not only be state competitors that would be using this technology, it could be corporate competitors that would want to listen in on conversations,” he says.
Espionage in the oil business dates back to the industry’s earliest days and hasn’t remitted. Two hard drives belonging to Brazilian oil company Petrobras and containing vital data on giant offshore oil deposits were stolen last year. Brazilian authorities called it “industrial espionage.”
Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers declined to comment on the specifics of Mr. Tillerson’s phone. All he would say is: “Security of information is a vital part of our business controls and we take it very seriously.” (more)
Phones are just the tip of their information security iceberg.
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