Security News > 2020 > December > Was there a “COVID-19 vaccine hack” against the European Medicines Agency?
The EMA, based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, is responsible for the evaluation and approval of medicines in the European Union - a role reflected in its former name, the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products.
There's no suggestion of when the attack was discovered, how it was found, when it probably started, how extensive it seems to have been, how much disruption it has caused, whether anyone outside the EMA was potentially affected, how long it's likely to take to restore the network to normal, or what the EMA is doing right now to stop it happening again.
Today [2020-12-09], we were informed by the European Medicines Agency that the agency has been subject to a cyber attack and that some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed.
We first detected Egregor in September during an attack against a customer.
Help your own staff to be the eyes and ears of your security team and they will help you to catch sight of attacks sooner.