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Poor but nuclear-armed North Korea has closed its borders since January last year in an attempt to protect itself from a coronavirus pandemic that began in neighboring China and has claimed more than 2 million lives around the world. human lives.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has repeatedly claimed that there were no cases of coronavirus infection in COVID-19 in his country, although experts question those statements.
Furthermore, the tighter isolation has increased pressure on the economy, which is plagued by international sanctions against Pyongyang for the development of prohibited weapons systems.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service “informed us that North Korea was trying to seize technology related to the vaccine and COVID treatment using cyber warfare to break into Pfizer,” MP Ha Tae-keung said after a closed parliamentary session.
North Korea is known to have thousands of well-trained programmers who have carried out cyberattacks against companies, institutions, and research centers in South Korea and elsewhere.
Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, developed in collaboration with German company BioNTech, was first approved for distribution late last year.
This drug is based on a fragment of the virus’s genetic material, information RNA (mRNA), which stimulates cells in the human body to produce coronavirus-specific proteins, which in turn triggers the body’s immune response.
Pfizer predicts it will distribute up to $ 2 billion this year. vaccine dose.
The company’s South Korean office has yet to respond to AFP’s request for comment on the hacking message.
In December, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that COVID-19 vaccine documents had been “illegally accessed” through a cyberattack against a European Medicines Agency (EMA) server.
The Amsterdam-based EEA, which is responsible for monitoring the pharmaceutical market in the European Union, said it had been the target of a hack, but did not indicate when the attack took place and if it was linked to measures against COVID-19.
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