Hacker attacks and the valuable pharma sector data

By Chris Wheal

February 21, 2024

SonicWall claimed ‘threat actors’ had diversified their tactics

Computer security and managed service provider SonicWall has this week warned that overall intrusion attempts climbed 20% in 2024 to nearly one billion as ‘threat actors’ diversified their tactics. SonicWall claimed to have discovered 293,989 ‘never-before-seen’ malware variants – that’s 805 a day.

The increase in attacks happened around the globe. Ransomware was up 27% in the second half of the year. Cryptojacking – when hackers use businesses computers’ bandwidth and electricity to mine energy-intensive cryptocurrencies – spiked 659%. IoT exploit was up 15% and encrypted threats up117%.

They would say that wouldn’t they?

It would be easy to dismiss reports like SonicWall’s Annual Cyber Threat Report, as marketing guff. The company is a managed services provider and is looking for business – within the pharma sector, it mainly works with high-street distributors. 

But the pharma sector is far from immune to the menace of cybercriminals. During Covid, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) admitted it had been breached, with documents relating to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine unlawfully accessed. In later updates it said the published documents had been doctored to “undermine trust in vaccines”.

North Korean hackers targeted AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Novovax for vaccine information. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it had identified more than 200 attacks specifically related to the pandemic vaccine research ‘almost certainly’ from Russian intelligence services.

Valuable data

It’s the value of the data that makes pharma companies and their biomedical life sciences family such targets. 

IBM Security's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 placed the pharma sector in third place in the league table of the costs of cyberattacks, with the separate healthcare sector at the top and finance second. 

The total cost of cybercrime to the pharma sector, though down from 2022’s USD$5.01m was still a whopping $4.82m. This was despite the sector suffering just 4% of overall attacks.

The good news is that IBM said the time it takes a company to spot it has a data breach has fallen – but from an alarming 207 days in 2022 to 204 last year. Those three extra days were then lost because containment took 73 days, longer than the 70 days it took the year before.

No let-up

There will be no let-up for the sector as its research and personal data is so valuable, either to rivals – state actors or otherwise – or to those who would undermine medical advances with antivax and anti-progress scare stories.

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