Photo by Edward Jenner from Pexels
For pharmaceutical companies, cyberattacks can get expensive quickly.
In 2021, the average cost of a data breach was $5 million, which is the third-highest of any industry, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach report.
Cyberattacks can also cause operational disruptions. For example, in 2017, Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK) struggled to keep up with demand for hepatitis B vaccine because it was a victim of Notpetya ransomware. Merck estimated the damages from that attack to be roughly $1.4 billion.
Breaches in the pharma industry are rampant, concludes a recently published report from the cybersecurity firm Constella (Los Altos, California), which analyzes data exposures, breaches and leakages within the industry from January 2018 to September 2021. In that time frame, the company identified 9,030 breaches or leakages and more than 4,500,000 exposed record…