The scope of a hacking campaign discovered by IBM last year against companies involved in the production, transportation, and storage of COVID-19 vaccines has now been expanded to include more than 40 companies in 14 countries, according to the company.
Researchers from IBM’s X-Force cyber-security division wrote in a blog post that attacks against the “cold chain” – a temperature-controlled supply chain – illustrate the risk of intellectual property infringement and possible disruption for stakeholders in the delicate process of transporting vaccines across long distances at stable temperatures.
The attacks, which involved hackers posing as representatives of Qingdao Haier Biomedical, a China-based company and one of the world’s largest makers of equipment to store and distribute materials at cold temperatures, were discovered in December, according to IBM.
The researchers wrote in the blog post “Exploring the available emails, X-Force uncovered multiple features which likely signal the actor’s exceptional knowledge of the cold chain,”
“While our previous reporting featured direct targeting of supranational organisations, the energy, and IT sectors across six nations, we believe this expansion to be consistent with the established attack pattern, and the campaign remains a deliberate and calculated threat.”
While IBM did not name any alleged hacking groups behind the attacks, it previously stated that it believed the operation was carried out by an unnamed nation-state. IBM declined to comment about whether the attacks were successful in persuading people to open the malicious attachments.