Cybersecurity Lessons Learned From COVID-19

It’s fair to say we’ve all been on a steep learning curve thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, but one facet which may not immediately spring to mind relates to cyber security. Cyber criminals have become incredibly skilled at identifying and exploiting the weak links in pharmaceutical supply chains.

One such attack saw bad actors impersonating representatives of cold chain storage and delivery material provider, Qingdao Haier Biomedical. The fraudsters contacted several high-level representatives from companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccine supply chain in an effort to gain access to resources and information which could then presumably be used for blackmail or corporate espionage purposes.

Three vulnerabilities have been identified in the pharma supply chain as a result. Track and trace systems which rely heavily on manual updates, the potential to redirect shipments with stolen credentials, and endpoint security gaps that make healthcare providers vulnerable to attacks.

New technology such as blockchain with its automatic and highly secure public ledger of each stage in a shipment could help address some of these issues, but very few companies have implemented it at this point in time.