A state-supported Chinese hacking group has targeted the IT systems of two Indian vaccine manufacturers. The COVID-19 vaccine shots of these two companies are being used in the countrys vaccination campaign.

 

China and India have both sold or gifted their coronavirus vaccine shots to several countries. India has produced more than 60% of all the vaccines sold world-wide.

 

Goldman Sachs-backed Cyfirma, which is based in Singapore and Tokyo, said that Chinese hacking group APT10, known as Stone Panda, has identified few gaps and susceptibilities in the IT infrastructure and in the supply chain software of Bharat Biotech along with the Serum Institute of India (SII), which is the worlds largest vaccine maker.

 

Cyfirma Chief Executive. Kumar Ritesh, who was a former a top cyber official in British foreign intelligence agency MI6, said that the real inspiration is in fact exfiltrating intellectual property and attaining competitive advantage over Indian pharmaceutical companies. He further said APT10 was aggressively targeting SII, who is making the AstraZeneca vaccine for several countries and soon will start bulk-manufacturing the Novavax vaccine shots. They have found that many of their public servers are running weak, which are vulnerable web servers. This is an alarming situation.

 

Chinas foreign ministry hasn’t commented yet. Also, SII and Bharat Biotech had declined to comment. 

 

The US Department of Justice said that in 2018 APT10 had acted in relation with the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Microsoft said that in November, they had detected cyber-attacks from Russia and North Korea which targeted coronavirus vaccine companies in India, France, Canada, South Korea and the United States. North Korean hackers also tried to break the systems of British drugmaker- AstraZeneca.

 

Ritesh’s firm tracks the activities of 750 cyber criminals and monitors approximately 2,000 hacking campaigns by using a tool called decipher. It is not clear what information they might have accessed. Bharat Biotechs Covaxinis developed with the support of Indian Council of Medical Research and will be exported to several countries and Brazil too.

 

US drug maker Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE, its German partner said that in December documents that were related to development of the coronavirus vaccine were "unlawfully accessed" by a cyber attack on the regulator of Europes medicines.

 

The relations between nuclear-armed neighbours China and India were soured since June last year as 20 Indian and 4 Chinese soldiers were killed in a Himalayan border fight. The recent talks have eased the tension between them.

 

Source: ET Healthworld