Because Covid vaccines are a matter of national security

Giuseppe Gagliano's analysis

According to the analysis of the French Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information, targeting the health system as a whole and supply chains represents today a serious threat. Such cyber attacks could actually have critical effects on the ability to cope with the pandemic.

In fact, the French medical industrial sector weighs heavily on the French economy with a turnover of 75 billion euros. But the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the number of cyber attacks targeting the pharmaceutical industry, raising many questions from the point of view of its security and stability, but also of the usefulness of its increasing digitization.

Last December, the European Medicines Agency revealed that it had been the victim of a hacker attack. The hackers had seized several regulatory documents on Covid-19 vaccines provided by laboratories, including Pfizer and Moderna.

A month later, on January 12, part of the loot, mostly related to Pfizer, was posted on a Russian darkweb forum, then forwarded to another well-known and easily accessible data sales forum.

In this pandemic period, where pharmaceutical companies are heavily involved, the theft and then the resale of medical data is thriving. Earning money appears to be the main reason for these attacks. But it is not excluded that states, eager to lead the frenzied vaccine race, may also use this type of maneuver as a sort of war waged behind the scenes and carried out by special intelligence units specialized in cyber warfare.

The companies responsible for the storage and transport of Covid-19 vaccines are therefore the priority objectives. But it is above all the cold chain, necessary for certain pharmaceutical products to remain operational, that interests hackers. Therefore, the entire industry is at the mercy of hackers, making the vaccine a real national security problem.

But the vaccine remains also, and above all, a priority geopolitical issue. In addition to the competitiveness between companies or states in access to drugs, hackers, difficult to identify, take advantage of it to increase and ultimately distort competition. In fact, cyber attacks directly affect the progress of scientific and medical research.

Finally, it should be noted that these various operations directly affect the trust citizens can have in these vaccines.

We must therefore ask ourselves why the healthcare sector is so easily the target of cyber attacks.

Several answers can be given and among them certainly the proliferation of intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry and the sensitive nature of patient data. As it becomes difficult to control and thus protect them, it becomes easier to damage them. A situation that is also amplified with the flow of data circulating in this type of sector. Therefore, it would appear that threats to the French pharmaceutical sector come directly from within companies. The digitization of this sector, with the aim of increasing its competitiveness, has therefore undermined its security.

At this point we must ask ourselves if digital is not paradoxically the real cause of its own danger.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/perche-i-vaccini-anti-covid-sono-una-questione-di-sicurezza-nazionale/ on Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:49:55 +0000.