Biopharma Confronts a Rising Tide of Ransomware Attacks

When the Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai announced last week that a ransomware attack had hit it, it joined a crowded club.

Sun Pharmaceuticals saw some of its file systems compromised in an attack in March. Novartis fell victim to such an attack last year. AstraZeneca was targeted by hackers in 2020, Reuters reported. And, in perhaps the most notorious such episode, malware infected computers at Merck in 2017, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and disrupting the production of its HPV vaccine.