Saipem's Servers Hit by Cyberattack

In a brief public statement issued Monday, Italian subsea engineering and oil services firm Saipem announced that it had detected an attack on its regional server systems in the Middle East. 

"We are collecting all the elements useful for assessing the impact on our infrastructures and the actions to be taken to restore normal activities," the firm said. "We are also in the process of notifying the report of the incident to the competent authorities."

Saipem officials told Bloomberg that about 400 of its servers - primarily units located in Middle Eastern countries - were hit by the attack, but not its main servers in Europe. The hacking attempt is believed to have originated in India. 

"We're keeping the servers down to understand what happened," said Saipem head of digital Mauro Piasere, speaking to Reuters. 

The company has backups of all the affected data, so no information was permanently lost in the attack. Saipem has not found reason to believe that any data was stolen. 

Saipem's servers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE were especially hard-hit, the firm said. Saudi state oil firm Saudi Aramco is Saipem's biggest client, and the firm has a major role in Saudi upstream and downstream projects. It maintains a local fabrication yard in the oil and gas hub of Dammam. which has helped it win more work in the kingdom. “Saudi Arabia is very, very important and there are many more projects we’ll be participating in,” said Saipem CEO Stefano Cao in an earnings call in October.