The massive oil drilling and fracking company Halliburton announced that, as a result of a cyberattack earlier this week, it has disabled several of its internal systems.
Halliburton claimed it became aware of unwanted access to its networks on Wednesday and responded by “proactively taking certain systems offline” in a brief statement that was sent to government regulators on Thursday. “Working to identify any effects of the incident,” the business stated.
One of the biggest energy corporations in the world, according to company documents, employs 48,000 people across several countries. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in a large oil spill, for which the American energy corporation Halliburton later agreed to pay a $1.1 billion settlement to the US government.
“There are no indications that the incident is impacting energy services at this time and DOE is coordinating with interagency partners,” stated Jeremy Ortiz, a spokesman for the US department of Energy, in a statement.
After a cyberattack, it is typical for businesses to shut down their systems in an effort to keep the hackers from accessing compromised systems or those of others. This year, numerous businesses shut down their systems as a result of ransomware attacks, including the large healthcare provider Change Healthcare and the manufacturer of automotive software CDK.
Beyond what the corporation had filed, Halliburton representative Victoria Ingalls declined to comment. Ingalls refused to comment on the specifics of the security problem or if the business had heard from the hackers when contacted by TechCrunch.
TechCrunch discovered a possible security flaw on Friday that lets anybody use Halliburton’s single-sign-on provider to access internal networks. TechCrunch posed questions to Halliburton spokesperson Ingalls regarding the company’s awareness of the problem and whether it offers a mechanism for the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities.Ingalls declined to respond and restated Halliburton’s standard statement.
