Sat 14 November 2020:
Microsoft said on Friday that State-backed hackers from North Korea and Russia have been targeting organisations working on a coronavirus vaccine.
Microsoft said that it has witnessed efforts by state-backed Russian and North Korean hacking groups to target and steal valuable data from pharmaceutical companies and coronavirus vaccine researchers.
“In recent months, we’ve detected cyberattacks from three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for COVID-19,” Tom Burt, the corporate vice president of Customer Security and Trust at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “The attacks came from Strontium, an actor originating from Russia, and two actors originating from North Korea that we call Zinc and Cerium.”
Burt said that the targets include leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States.
Some of the break-in attempts failed, but Microsoft warned that some of them had been successful.
Russia has previously denied targeting vaccine research. The Russian embassy in Washington, USA told news agency Reuters it had nothing further to add.
The company said that the Strontium hacking group was using “brute force login attempts” to access credentials for accounts of companies targeted, while the two North Korean hacking groups were mainly relying on malicious phishing emails to target the companies.
News of the attempted hackings come as the US gears up to distribute the vaccine against coronavirus. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced this week that they produced a vaccine that was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19, according to an early analysis that included 94 confirmed cases of coronavirus in trial participants.
The company announced that its president Brad Smith is participating in the Paris Peace Forum on Friday “where he will urge governments to do more.”
“We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate – or even facilitate – within their borders.”
In a blog post, Microsoft called on world leaders to “affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law”.
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