How to Identify, Quantify, and Remediate Attacks on the COVID Vaccine Cold Chain

When nation-state actors and organized cybercriminals began sophisticated attacks in mid-2020 against the supply chain for COVID vaccines, IBM X-Force warned governments and healthcare entities of the danger. These were not merely isolated attacks against HVAC suppliers. The attacks began even before Pfizer or Moderna had authorization, involved spoofing of legitimate healthcare executives, and aimed at stealing vaccines and sabotaging their delivery while undermining governmental credibility. What happened behind the scenes is an intriguing use of quantitative frameworks in combination with breach and attack simulation (BAS) to confront a multi-faceted global attack. In this session Colin and Itzik will discuss: -The highly sophisticated COVID Cold Chain attacks -The quantitative framework we used to assess the gravity of the threats -What made this an outlier threat, and why we informed customers that it’s quantifiably more dangerous than other COVID-focused attacks. -How we leveraged automated breach and attack simulation to identify the attacks and determine what remediations were necessary and validate them once they were carried out, ensuring they would be effective in blocking attacks. -How to run a comprehensive threat analysis program to block attacks targeting healthcare and COVID-facing organizations. -Ways to automate remediation steps based on risk metrics and then continuously tune threat intelligence and vulnerability engines to progressively improve security posture and drive risk down.