We are sure that more information will come to light as this story continues to break, but evidence shows that the data had been altered and manipulated prior to its publication to undermine the trust in the vaccine.
What does this mean?
Hackers stealing, changing or misusing information is not new. What it does show, however, is a shift in the focus of large hacking organisations.
In the past, the focus of an attack was more often to demonstrate the hacker’s skills or to steal information to sell. It appears that influencing people’s actions or thoughts is higher on some hackers’ agendas and over the past 12 months, we have seen many websites being modified.
What can you do to protect yourselves?
As with many breaches of this style, being able to monitor and alert changes in files is simple and very low cost.
A File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) Solution is one way to monitor changes to documents and files. A manual Quality Assurance (QA) review of documents before publishing is another way to reduce errors being published.
Monitoring hacking sites like zone-h.org, where hackers show the evidence of hacking sites, is a good place to monitor.
As always, if you have the time, resource and expertise, implementing these solutions should be managed and monitored 24/7 in house. If, however, you do not have the resource, then we can help fill that gap for you.
We already protect our clients from attack and monitor networks 24/7/365. If you would like to discuss how we can help fill your security gaps, please get in touch.
