Platinum giant Sibanye hit by cyberattack, mining business unaffected

(Reuters) -Sibanye-Stillwater said on Thursday that a cyberattack on its IT system since Monday morning has caused limited disruption to its global operations, but its core mining and processing business was operating normally.

The Johannesburg-based precious metals producer said its been able to protect its data by "proactively isolating" the IT system and an investigation into the hack was on.

The attack brought down its server and disrupted the system globally, James Wellsted, a company spokesperson told Reuters, adding that Sibanye has hired external experts to help identify the breach and bring the system back up.

"Our global IT infrastructure was impacted since Monday morning, some things are working some are not," he said. "We are still trying to identify what's behind the attack."

The company is still not aware who was behind the attack and there has not been any demands for payment, Wellsted said.

Sibanye mines platinum and gold in home country South Africa. It also operates a palladium mine in Montana, U.S. and has lithium, nickel and zinc projects in Finland, France and Australia.

"Our efforts remain focused on working towards the full remediation of the effects of this attack," the company said.

(Reporting by Felix Njini in Johannesburg and Yamini Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Jason Neely and Arun Koyyur)