Marene Allison, the Chief Info Safety Officer at Johnson & Johnson, one of many corporations concerned within the analysis and improvement of a COVID-19 vaccine, stated this week that healthcare organizations like her employer are seeing cyber-attacks from nation-state risk actors “each single minute of each single day.”
Allison’s feedback come after on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Johnson & Johnson was one in every of six COVID-19 analysis corporations which were focused by North Korean hackers searching for vaccine info.
“Healthcare corporations actually have seen an onslaught [of cyberattacks] since March 2010,” Allison stated on Thursday in an internet panel on the Aspen Cyber Summit.
“That’s the day that the Chinese language truly began a tough knock of many of the healthcare in the US.”
“Meredith and I, and in all CISOs and healthcare [organizations], are seeing tried penetrations by nation-state actors, not simply North Korea, each single minute of each single day,” Allison stated, referring to Meredith Harper, CISO at Eli Lilly, one other pharmaceutical firm concerned within the COVID-19 response, additionally current on the web panel.
The Johnson and Johnson CEO stated that “with the vaccine in improvement,” her firm is now “on a grander stage.”
Allison additionally stated that her firm would not “have the assets to know the place [an attack] got here from,” or what attackers are literally going after, however as a substitute has been working and counting on H-ISAC and CISA to determine and classify cyber-attacks.
All in all, Allison stated Johnson & Johnson noticed a 30% uptick in cyber-attacks concentrating on the corporate, however that they could not inform how a lot was COVID-19-related.
“There’s solely going to be so many individuals who may get info and switch it right into a vaccine,” she stated. “Then we’ll have the
group of people that simply resolve that ‘effectively I do not need the world to have a vaccine’.
“For us, inside, it is actually not a lot of a distinction,” Allison stated.
