There have been “drone sightings in proximity to offshore energy structures,” reported Offshore Energies UK 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 are there for a very good reason,” Graham Skinner, the trade body’s health and safety manager for offshore infrastructure, told the BBC.
“When the crews spot 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 crucial offshore infrastructure: That’s an alarming state of affairs. Even more so, as it’s not a one-off or a bizarre occurrence exclusively affecting the oil and gas sector. In recent months, we’ve seen drones loitering around a range of facilities on land, including arms factories. On one of the coldest days of January this year, someone sabotaged power cables in Berlin, leaving some 100,000 residents without power, heat and internet for days.
We have also seen arson attacks carried out against warehouses, shopping malls and even defense companies. We’ve seen attempts to bring down airliners using parcel bombs, constant cyberattacks and a string of highly suspicious incidents involving ships and undersea cables. 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.
The fact that companies are experiencing an onslaught of disruptive activities should come as no surprise. Businesses are indispensable to the daily functioning of our societies. They are attractive and vulnerable targets, and police and military can’t 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 key concern. When asked what type of grey-zone acts they were concerned 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, such as wrongful detention or assassination attempts.