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to competitors. There is a huge and complex eco- system in today’s pharmaceutical industry with many third parties involved – each one bringing an element of risk if preventative measures are not in place. This has been seen in other sectors with a recent example being the coverage of breaches suffered by law fi rms supporting M&A activity in the mining sector.
Sales and marketing information can be extremely useful to peers. Knowledge of competitor sales data and doctors’ prescribing habits can help pharma players target their products more accurately, or simply avoid those physicians with strong loyalty to other brands. Medical records can be used to write fake prescriptions to facilitate undercover operations involving the purchase and resale of prescription drugs.
The explosion in hand-held devices has increased the number of access points to data, as sales representatives enter details on mobile phones, tablets or laptops, often in health centres or hospitals. For a multinational, this translates into hundreds of thousands of touch points worldwide, often via a myriad of different software applications, presenting a host of opportunities
The scale of today’s life sciences giants also makes them vulnerable to fraud. With thousands of suppliers and healthcare professionals on their books worldwide, it is often too easy to hack into systems and set up bogus accounts receiving modest payments. Even organisations with robust fi nancial controls may struggle to identify such criminal activity, which in total could cost millions.
for criminals to access commercially sensitive or personal information.
The brand risk looms large here again. Public trust in pharma companies and their products is absolutely fundamental to the industry. If the public began to doubt the security of their data or the integrity of pharma products, the consequences could be huge.
Sometimes information is leaked due to sheer carelessness. The press is quick to publish stories of laptops containing confi dential patient data discarded in hospital skips. Details from one pharma company’s entire salary and payroll database were reportedly downloaded by accident to a publicly-accessible website, while another company inadvertently released details of patients taking a particular drug by sending emails with a to multiple recipients in the “cc” fi eld instead of a hidden as “bcc” addresses.
© 2014 KPMG LLP, a UK limited liability partnership, and a member fi rm of the KPMG network of independent member fi rms affi liated with KPMG International Cooperative, a Swiss entity. All rights reserved.
The scale of today’s life sciences giants also makes them vulnerable to fraud. With thousands of suppliers and healthcare professionals on their books worldwide, it is often too easy to hack into systems and set up bogus accounts receiving modest payments. Even organisations with robustt fi nancial controls may struggle to identify such criminal activity, which in total could cost millions.
PLUGGING THE GAPS
What, then, can pharmas do to combat this multiplicity of threats and risks?
It is fi rst and foremost important to keep a sense of perspective. This industry, like many others is successful today precisely because of the technology we describe. It is enabled collaboration from concept to go-to-market in a way that simply was not possible or economically viable before. We should not lose sight of this, nor
CYBER SECURITY
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