Name: Covid-19 Vaccines Are Coming—So Are Hackers | WSJ
Uploaded: 2021-05-30T08:07:59.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Narrator] Delivering millions of COVID-19 vaccines

refrigerated trucks and cold storage facilities.

And each of these could be a target for hackers.

- COVID has been just a golden opportunity

for cyber criminals and they've taken full advantage of it.

- [Narrator] Since the start of the pandemic,

there have been attempts to scam individuals

And a week before the first vaccinations in the world

began in the UK, INTERPOL warned that criminal organizations

The cold chain network that enables the delivery

of temperature sensitive COVID-19 vaccines,

like the one developed by Pfizer and BioNTech,

that has to be kept at -70 degrees Celsius.

The people that are doing it are increasingly sophisticated.

- [Narrator] So are hackers targeting the vaccine rollout

Hackers have been honing their skills for years

- The average hospital doesn't have very good cybersecurity.

of the concern that the virus has raised.

- [Narrator] Jim Lewis leads a cybersecurity team

He says the easiest tool for hackers is phishing.

- You send an email out to a hundred people,

the odds are very good that two of them will click on it.

is the opportunity to do this on a massive scale

and that means you can ask for a massive ransom.

- [Narrator] If someone clicks on a malicious link

the person may be prompted to download malware

giving the attacker access to the network and its data.

with emails sent to hospitals about COVID-19 prevention

And now that the vaccines are on their way,

that support biotech and pharmaceutical clients.

- I think the messages were very specifically crafted

to get people at these companies to respond

but in general, this whole problem of Corona virus

The hacker was disguised as a project manager

from the Chinese company, Haier Biomedical

is the world's only complete cold chain provider.

The message went on to ask that the reader

which is actually a malicious attachment.

clicked on the file and fell for this scam

and doesn't know which nation state might be behind it.

could give the hacker insight into internal communications

Haier Biomedical says it condemns the perpetrators

and is working with international organizations

don't deter the fight against the pandemic.

But if hackers do successfully access the system,

they can encrypt the data, making it unreadable.

- And so you could imagine a locking up the supply chain,

locking up distribution codes, or locking the trucks

and saying, unless you pay, you won't be able to deliver.

- [Narrator] But some systems in the cold chain

- Yeah, the actual operation of a refrigerator,

that would be a specialized operating system

and that would be configured in a way that was unusual so

- [Narrator] So what's more likely to happen

is that hackers will go after low hanging fruit.

just hitting standard windows operating machines.

So if you were working for a refrigeration company,

I'd be worried about the sort of the back office equipment