SHAMOON VIRUS "MOST DESTRUCTIVE YET"

The "Shamoon" virus that attacked Saudi Arabia's state oil company, ARAMCO, was probably the most destructive attack the business sector has seen to date, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday.

"More than 30,000 computers that it infected (at ARAMCO) were rendered useless, and had to be replaced," he said.

Shamoon included a routine called a "wiper," coded to self-execute, which replaced crucial system files with an image of a burning U.S. flag. It also overwrote all the real data on the machine with what he called garbage data.

"While this kind of tactic isn't new, the scale and speed with which it happened was unprecedented,"

The possibility that the “Shamoon” malware has hit the Saudi Arabian oil-production firm is based on the Wednesday disclosure by the company that an unspecified malware intrusion had prompted it to shutter down its main computer systems

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