State-linked hacking continues amid race for coronavirus treatments, US and UK agencies warn
Hackers linked with foreign governments continue to target multiple global health care organizations and pharmaceutical companies in a possible bid to gather intelligence or steal research related to the coronavirus pandemic, American and British cybersecurity agencies said Tuesday. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) “are currently investigating a number of incidents in which threat actors are targeting pharmaceutical companies, medical research organizations, and universities,” the agencies said in a joint advisory. They did not point the finger at particular governments. Advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, as state-linked hackers are known, have been scanning public websites of target companies looking for insecure software to exploit, said DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the NCSC. Hackers have also been using a technique called password spraying, which throws common passwords at targets until one of them works, to attack health care organizations in the U.S., […]
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