Cyber-attacks target pharma

The pharmaceutical industry has entered the elite realm of high-volume, high-value, high-sensitivity data generators prized by cyber-attackers. Drugmakers have joined their counterparts in the financial services, utility, consumer products, and high-tech fields.

Pharma and chemical companies experienced a 3.2 times higher rate of Trojan attacks than other vertical industries studied, reports eWeek Security Watch. Drugmakers also suffered a rise in password theft and backdoor attacks during 2009--14 times higher than the average for other verticals.

A recent large-scale attack penetrated Merck, one of more than 2,400 companies whose data were accessed. One computer had been infected, however, and no sensitive information was compromised, reports the Wall Street Journal.

And to make matters worse, pharma-related messages top the spam list for 2009, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the daily onslaught comprising an average 200 billion malicious messages. The spam rate sat at 600 million messages per day for the first half of 2009, according to an M86 report, but jumped to nearly 3 billion per day in the latter half.

- here's the security article
- read the Journal piece
- see the spam article

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