HYDERABAD: Pharma major
Dr Reddy’s Laboratories was the target of a
cyber attack less than a week after it received approvals to start phase two and three trials of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, in India.
Although the company refused to say if the hackers tried to steal vaccine-related data, the attack has come at time when Covid-19 vaccine developers across the world have faced similar threats. As early as July, US security agencies had charged Chinese government-linked hackers with targeting biotech company Moderna involved in developing a vaccine. Japanese vaccine makers, on the other hand, have been facing attacks since April.
Security agencies in the UK too have said that several organisations involved in Covid-19 vaccine development in the UK, US, and Canada have been targeted by a Russian hacking group. Chinese hackers allegedly stole data from Spanish laboratories in mid-September.
The data breach at Dr Reddy’s took place early on Thursday morning and reportedly forced the company to shut all its global manufacturing facilities. The company has facilities in India, the US, the UK, Mexico and China. The breach is believed to have taken place at the company’s own data centre and also brought down its website for a few hours.
The company informed the bourses that “in the wake of a detected cyber-attack, we have isolated all data centre services to take required preventive actions”.
“We are anticipating all services to be up within 24 hours and we do not foresee any major impact on our operations due to this incident,”
Dr Reddy’s Labs CIO Mukesh Rathi said in a regulatory filing. Dr Reddy’s Labs CFO Saumen Chakraborty confirmed that the data centre targeted by the hackers was the company’s own but the impact of the attack was “minimal”.
Dr Reddy’s sources also said that only a few manufacturing facilities were impacted by the attack.
The news of the data breach sent the company’s scrip tumbling in early trade to Rs 4,832 per share before closing 0.46% (23.30 points) lower on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Thursday at Rs 5,023.6 per share as compared to Wednesday’s closing price of Rs 5,046.9 a share.
Dr Reddy’s had entered into a tie up with Russia’s sovereign wealth fund Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) in September this year to conduct clinical trials for Sputnik V in India and to distribute 100 million doses of the vaccine in India.