A global push to develop a vaccine to slow the spread of COVID-19 has pharmaceutical companies racing to produce the first vaccine for distribution. AstraZeneca, a global, science-led biopharmaceuticals business is currently the frontrunner in the race for a vaccine with more than 90% efficacy against the virus in their third and last round of human trials. Now, they’re also the front runner for being targeted by cybercriminals.
Healthcare organizations have not been immune to the plague of cybersecurity-related issues in 2020. These issues range from malware that compromises the integrity of systems in place, to phishing scams that prey on employee negligence tricking employees to click on malware attachments that allow malicious code to be downloaded to the victim’s computers. According to sources, employees at AstraZeneca were presented with threat actors disguised as recruiters on social networking site LinkedIn and messaging platform WhatsApp. They presented staff members with fake job offers. These offers consisted of documents and links to malicious codes that downloaded malware that exfiltrated the victim’s computers’ credentials leading to eventually granting access to their machine.
View Our Guide on How To Identify Phishing Emails Here
US Officials and Cybersecurity experts have attributed the tools and techniques used in the attacks as part of an ongoing hacking campaign attributed to North Korea. The campaign has previously focused on defense companies and media organizations, but pivoted to COVID-related targets in recent weeks.
How Security Awareness Training Protects Your Organization
Security Awareness training is a form of education where we provide information and knowledge on how to not get taken advantage of online by cyber threats. Some advantages of our training is that it is all delivered remotely, and it is easy to consume, precise in its messaging and bonus it is also entertaining and keeps teams interested in the information.
Comprehensive security awareness training is one of the best ways to help protect your business from malicious actors and prevent possible data breaches. Your employees are often the first line of defense against a cyber-attack. Security awareness training makes employees well-trained on how to prevent, respond to, and recover from an attack. Social engineering attacks, spear-phishing, and ransomware attacks that target employees by email are some of the most costly and common security attacks.
Employees are part of an organization’s attack surface, and ensuring that employees are trained on best practices on how to defend your organization against cyber threats is a critical part of a healthy cybersecurity journeys. Depending on your internal IT security resources and expertise available at your organization it might make sense to bring in a third party such as Corsica Technologies to assist with security awareness training services. If you are interested in meeting with one of our experts give us a call at (877)901-2022 or reach out to us here to schedule a consultation
