ALERT: Pharmaceutical Sector

We are getting a large number of reports of targetted attacks aimed at Pharmaceutical companies in the US and Europe. We have seen several different variants of a new malware campaign known a "Havex" that are not being detected by AV products.

1. Out of thousands of possible ICS suppliers, the three companies targeted for trojanized software were not primary suppliers to “energy” facilities. Instead, all three offered products and services most commonly used by the pharmaceutical industry.

2. The Dragonfly attack is very similar in nature to another campaign called Epic Turla and is likely managed by the same team. Epic Turla has been shown to have targeted the intellectual property of pharmaceutical companies.

3. The Dragonfly malware contained an Industrial Protocol Scanner module that searched for devices on TCP ports 44818 (Omron, Rockwell Automation), 102 (Siemens) and 502 (Schneider Electric). These protocols and products have a higher installed base in packaging and manufacturing applications typically found in consumer packaged goods industries, such as pharmaceutical rather than the energy industry.

“My research, coupled with my knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry, led me to conclude that it was the target of Dragonfly,” remarked Langill. “The potential damage could include the theft of proprietary recipes and production batch sequence steps, as well as network and device information that indicate manufacturing plant volumes and capabilities.”