Experts encourage better 'cyber hygiene' as pharma breaches skyrocket amid the pandemic

The potential cost of a cyberattack should be incentive enough. According to Constella, the average cost per breach in the pharma sector is $5 million. Bigger attacks, however, cause much more damage. In 2017, ransomware dubbed NotPetya eliminated years of research at Merck and crippled Gardasil 9 production facilities, forcing the company to dip into the US national stockpile. And though Merck wasn’t even the intended target of the ransomware, the pharma giant still suffered more than $1.4 billion in losses as a result.

In a worst-case scenario, Charles Fracchia told Endpoints News a couple of weeks ago that a targeted attack could crumble “virtually all biomanufacturing infrastructure in the US” overnight.

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