State-Backed Chinese Hackers Target Vaccine Makers SII, Bharat Biotech

Goldman Sachs-backed Cyfirma said Chinese hacking group APT10, also known as Stone Panda identified gaps and vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure and supply chain software of Bharat Biotech and the Serum Institute of India.

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New Delhi: Chinese-stated backed hackers targeted Indian vaccine markers - Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech - IT systems in the recent weeks. The two firms are the only ones which are making Covid vaccines in India and distributing it to different parts of the world. India produces over 60 percent of the world's vaccines. While both China and India have sold or gifted vaccines to various countries.

Goldman Sachs-backed Cyfirma told Reuters, that the Chinese hacking group APT10 or 'Stone Panda' identified vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure and supply chain software of the two vaccine markers.

Cyfirma Chief Executive Kumar Ritesh who used to be a top cyber official with British foreign intelligence agency MI6 told Reuters, “The real motivation here is actually exfiltrating intellectual property and getting competitive advantage over Indian pharmaceutical companies.”

Ritesh told Reuters that the Chinese hacking group is actively targetting Serum Institute of India which is making the AstraZeneca vaccine which was developed in collaboration with Oxford University. 

“In the case of Serum Institute, they have found a number of their public servers running weak web servers, these are vulnerable web servers,” Ritesh said, referring to the hackers according to Reuters. He added, “they have spoken about weak web application, they are also talking about weak content-management system. It’s quite alarming.”

Cyfirma said in a statement it had informed CERT authorities and that they had acknowledged the threat. The office of the director-general of the state-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) said the matter had been handed to its operations director, S.S. Sarma.

Sarma told Reuters CERT was a “legal agency and we can’t confirm this thing to media”.

Amid the ongoing row over cyber sabotage attempt in Mumbai, sources have informed ABP News that 8 GB of unaccounted data was transferred to Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) servers from five different countries, including China, between June and October last year.

Source informed ABP Live, 14 Trojan Horses (malware) were found in MSEB servers and attempts were made by hundreds of blacklisted IP addresses to log in to these servers from abroad.

Asserting there is concrete evidence of cyber sabotage, sources added some attempts to log in from abroad were successful too. Maharashtra cyber, the nodal agency for state cybersecurity, analysed and concluded that the power outage was potential cyber sabotage.