Data breach forces Dr Reddy's Laboratories to shut plants

Hyderabad: One of the biggest names in India's pharma sector, Dr Reddy's Laboratories, which is actively involved in manufacturing vaccine for Covid-19, has temporarily shut down its production facilities in America, London, Russia, Brazil and India following cyber attack during early hours of Thursday.

According to a statement from Dr Reddy's, it had isolated all data centre services to take required preventive actions after the detection of a cyber-attack. As a precautionary measure the company had temporarily shut down some of the production facilities.

In an intimation to the stock exchange, the company said: "In the wake of a detected cyber-attack, we have isolated all data centre services to take required preventive actions."

Dr Reddy's share was down by 23.30, or 0.46 per cent, to Rs 5,023.60 on BSE on Thursday. It touched an intra day low of Rs 4,832.40 and high of Rs 5,046.90.

CIO Mukesh Rathi said, "we are anticipating all services to be up within 24 hours and we do not foresee any major impact on our operations due to this incident." It may be mentioned here that that Dr Reddy's lab had received approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) to conduct phase 2/3 human clinical trial for Sputnik V vaccine developed by Russia.

This is the second cyberattack on a pharma company that is involved in manufacturing Covid-19 vaccine. Recently, Chinese hackers reportedly stole data from Spanish labs that had been working on a vaccine.