Suspected North Korean hackers attempted to break into the private computer system of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, one of the top three coronavirus vaccine candidate manufacturers.
Hackers posed as job recruiters on Linkedin and messaging app WhatsApp to entice AstraZeneca employees with job offers along with malware disguised as documents including job descriptions that were designed to gain access to the employees’ private data, Reuters reported.
The hackers targeted a “broad set of people” working in COVID-19 research, sources told Reuters, but are not believed to have accessed sensitive information. The North Korean mission to the United Nations in Geneva did not respond to a request for comment about the hack, but sources said the techniques used by the hackers were part of an ongoing effort to breach U.S. computer systems that cybersecurity experts have attributed to North Korea.
Instances of foreign cyberattacks during the pandemic have soared, with Microsoft having said this month that it had seen North Korean hackers carry out similar schemes targeting two different drug manufacturers in two different countries. South Korea’s government, meanwhile, said they had already foiled some of the hacking attempts.
North Korea has been blamed for a series of the most damaging cyberattacks on the U.S., such as the hack and leak of internal emails from Sony Pictures in 2014 and the 2016 theft of $81 million from the Central Bank of Bangladesh.
