Recruitment software provider Bullhorn recovers from cyberattack, but questions over data theft remain

Bullhorn, a US-based recruitment software provider serving more than 10,000 customers worldwide, shut down its platform after detecting a cyber incident. Problems began on Friday, October 16, when the company flagged trouble posting jobs to Indeed. By the next morning the platform was fully offline. Bullhorn said it disabled access to its systems to contain the activity and brought in CrowdStrike to help investigate and restore services.

For recruitment agencies, the outage meant losing access to candidate records, job applications, placements and, in some cases, the systems used to pay people. Services began returning on Monday in the UK, US and Australia, but recovery has been uneven. In its Tuesday update, Bullhorn said some users still had problems with single sign-on, password resets and customisations. Several products, including its automation tools, Talent Platform, Onboarding365 and Time & Expense, were still reporting degraded performance.

The bigger question is unanswered. Bullhorn says its forensic investigation is ongoing and it has not yet determined whether attackers took any customer data. It says it will contact customers if their information is found to be compromised, and it has warned people to watch for opportunistic scammers looking to exploit the disruption. This article covers only the opening of the original report.