Running Head: CYBERSECURITY 1

Cyber Security

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The most important Cybersecurity story in the news in the last three weeks is the attacks

discovered on the Covid 19 vaccine distribution operation by IBM (Pranggono et al., 2020). The

news media has reported that there are target attacks aimed at government organizations and

companies that will be responsible for the distribution of the Corona Vaccine globally. IBM is

however unsure on whether the goal of the attackers is to steal the data on how the vaccines are

kept in cool conditions to preserve them while they are in transportation or whether the main aim

is to sabotage the whole plan of vaccine distribution. The attackers used the approach of

impersonating an Executive working with Haier Biomedical, a Chinese company that specializes

in the transportation of the vaccine and the storage of Biological samples, by sending

compromised emails to the government organizations and companies so that on opening the

email, a virus is unleashed unto the computers which allow them to access all data related to the

technology used to preserve the vaccine.

The emails were sent to ten different companies, a factor that made the attacks alarming

such that Homeland Security had to issue its Security warning about the threat on Thursday. It

has been made clear by IBM that the countries that might be responsible for the attacks cannot be

traced for sure, but one fact that has been made clear is that any information concerning the

Coronavirus vaccine is vital to the globe and hence every target organization and company

should be on the lookout. They have further figured out that with numerous vaccines being

placed into wider use, the key aim of the hackers hired by a state is on the delivery infrastructure

of the vaccine to billions of people globally. They want to have a deeper understanding of the

cold chain process. It is however unclear what their true aim might be but it is suspected to either

be the stealing of intellectual property rights or ransomware (Muthuppalaniappan et al., 2020).

Most of these targets were in Asia and some Europeans.

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The advice I would offer to the relevant leaders and policymakers is that the security

surrounding the cold chain process should be hardened and that only trusted individuals should

be allowed any access to important data concerning the technology. The network firewalls

surrounding the target governmental organizations and companies should be overlapped in that

any trial attempt at breaching it will be detected and necessary actions are taken. Log in

credentials of corporate executives should also be changed frequently such that any cases of

impersonations can be easily detected. Vaccine timetable distributions should also be a secret

known to the correct officials so that any effort at sabotage can be countered at any attempt. The

list of vaccine recipients and the states where doses are being shipped should be kept like top

information so that the attackers are not given any lead on the target population and the vaccines

in transit as a protection measure.

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Reference

Muthuppalaniappan, M., & Stevenson, K. (2020). Healthcare Cyber-Attacks and the COVID-19

Pandemic: An Urgent Threat to Global Health. International Journal for Quality in

Health Care.

Pranggono, B., & Arabo, A. (2020). COVID‐19 pandemic cybersecurity issues. Internet

Technology Letters.