With the competition for a viable Coronavirus vaccine still at its height, AstraZeneca’s systems have been reportedly been accessed by North Korean Hackers over the past few weeks.
Sources have reported that the hackers in question found their way by pretending to job recruiters and contacted AstraZeneca employees via WhatsApp and LinkedIn with fake job offers. According to these sources, the hackers subsequently delivered documents claiming that they were job descriptions, however they were written in a dangerous code that allowed them to enter into AstraZeneca’s computer systems.
“A broad set of people” were targeted, including Coronavirus research scientists though there’s no confirmation as to whether or not their systems were fully breached. Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca are the top 3 developers of the Coronavirus vaccine.
According to sources, the tools at techniques utilized by the hackers appeared to be a part of a North Korean hacking campaign. This campaign uses cyberattacks to target health bodies, drugmakers and vaccine scientists throughout the course of the pandemic with the goal of stealing research information pertaining to the virus.
Iran Russia and China have also made prior attempts to gain access to leading drug creators in addition to the World Health Organization. It is also alleged that a few of the accounts that were linked to the attacks on AstraZeneca were registered to Russian emails in order to provide misinformation to investigators.
