After navigating a series of manufacturing problems in recent months, Sun Pharma has now been forced to respond to an entirely different type of issue.
Last week, Mumbai, India-based Sun Pharma disclosed an IT security breach. The company quickly isolated the affected systems and is investigating the situation, Sun said in a filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The incident did not affect Sun’s core systems and operations, Anoop Deshpande, the company’s security and compliance officer, said in the filing. The company didn't share any other details about the attack.
The pharma industry is no stranger to IT security breaches. Early last year, Novartis was reportedly a victim of hacking group Industrial Spy, which runs a marketplace of stolen data. Luckily for Novartis, no sensitive data were compromised.
Then, in November 2022, some AstraZeneca records were left exposed online due to a “user error,” a company spokesperson told Fierce Pharma at the time. Credentials for an internal server were left on a code sharing site, which left sensitive patient data exposed for more than a year.
And of course there was Merck & Co.’s 2017 cyberattack that sparked industrywide, if not worldwide, increased awareness of cybersecurity. The hit, dubbed NotPetya, led to serious financial losses and forced the company to temporarily halt certain manufacturing operations.
As for Sun, the latest incident is just another hit to the generics maker. Last month, the company started a class 2 recall of more than 34,000 bottles of generic diltiazem hydrochloride after the batch failed testing at an FDA laboratory. Before that, in December, the FDA slapped Sun with an import alert after a failed inspection at a plant in Gujarat, India.