Headquartered in Gladbach, Germany, Miltenyi Biotec, a private biotechnology company, has announced that they have fully recovered from a malware attack that recently affected some portions of their network over the past couple of weeks.
Miltenyi Biotec has been working on COVID 19 related products. From their website’s official statement, they disclosed an isolated case in their Organization where the Order processing was compromised by malware on their Global IT Infrastructure in the last two weeks. They have also assured the public there was no indication that the malware was inadvertently distributed to their partners and customers.
Aside from that, the biotechnology company has assured the public that all their processes have already been restored and back in the operational state.
Miltenyi Biotec is operating across 73 countries with a total of 3,000 employees. They are currently supplying SARS-CoV-2 antigens for the Researchers that are working on treatment vaccines against COVID-19. The SARS-CoV-2 antigens will help the researchers to investigate the virus-specific immune responses that include antigen-specific B cells and antibodies.
Miltenyi Biotec did not provide further information about the specific family of the malware–infected its systems. Still, it seems that the Mount Locker Ransomware has something to do with the attack as they claim responsibility for the attack early days of November. Mount Locker Ransomware Threat actors have been active since July 2020 and have already targeted several Organizations demanding multimillion dollars ransom from their victims.
As per a private security firm, the Cybercriminals responsible for this attack have stolen data from Miltenyi and have already leaked parts of the stolen data.
It is reported that they have stolen more than 1 GB of documents from Miltenyi Biotec.
It seems that this Biotech company attack is yet another series of attacks on companies that are working on treatments and vaccines against COVID-19. It can be recalled that Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories suffered an episode back in October which shut down their plants in Brazil, India, United Kingdom, and the US. Their company was commissioned to produce Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine, “Sputnik V.”
It has been recently revealed that there are now two COVID-19 vaccines from two Biotechnology Giants, Moderna, and Pfizer that seems to be 95% effective against the COVID-19.
