German chemicals giant Bayer victim of year long cyber attack | Hacker News Reader

German chemicals giant Bayer victim of year long cyber attack

techerati.com

86 pointsbeastibash33 comments

I don't think many would consider Bayer to ever be a "victim".

Interesting that on Bayer's wikipedia page [2] there is no link to the Contaminated haemophilia scandal [1]. In fact Bayer's wikipedia page seems to have been "cleaned". The "Controversies" section is gone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer

Wikipedia page cleaning seems to be the norm these days. There are some very peculiar Wikipedia editors who engage in a mix of seemingly-pertinent, well-sourced information removal and spurious mud-slinging.

There was the whole "Philip Cross" affair which seemed to be backed up by prominent figures in the Wikipedia community.[0]

Unfortunately, even the talk pages seem to be being sanitized now.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-44495696

It's naive to pretend it's not a battlefield.

It's nonetheless concerning what information an attacker may be trying to access.

Interesting. In the German version of the article [0], you see the list of criticism, including the contaminated haemophilia scandal.

[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_AG#Kritik_und_Skandale

If only companies/countries/individuals without a scandal or controversy in their history could become a 'victim', the newspapers would be amazingly empty...

It's in the Product/overview section, but it don't explictly say that Bayer was responsible.

The controversies section was removed in 2015:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bayer&diff=659392...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bayer&diff=next&o...

Despite any judgements, they are a victim in the sense that a perpetrator launched an attack on them.

Wether that attack is justified or not I'll not comment on

The information instead exists in the Products -> Overview section. The entire section is mostly dedicated to listing controversies and one has to read past these controversies to find out what products are sold by the company. Products that include one of the company's top selling drugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciprofloxacin which is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. The Products -> Overview section is very pessimistic in its description of products produced by the company, which doesn't seem fair when balanced against products which are deemed essential to world health.

I've also updated information on contaminated haemophilia blood products in Wikidata[1]. Wikidata is not limited by article lengths and the need to prioritise the layout of sections and information in the same way that Wikipedia is.

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q928528

Bayer is a filthy company that should have been shut down after being a key Nazi collaborator along with IBM, Siemens and others. Sure, they might be the victim of some cyber warfare, but in aggregate, they will never be a victim in my book, just a giant enterprise built on murder.

https://ahrp.org/auschwitz60-year-anniversary-the-role-of-ig...

Don’t forget their newest ongoing issue with Primodos in the U.K.! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primodos

https://news.sky.com/story/primodos-drug-linked-to-birth-def...

Of course Bayer is still insisting that everything is kosher. Well, not kosher, their response to that was creating Zyclon B when they were still part of IG Farben. It would seem that their commitment to morality remains broadly unchanged.

Geeh, I wonder why the Chinese hacked one of the biggest companies in the world.

Maybe for ... let's take a guess... trade secrets and IP?

At this point, considering China's all but official policy of stealing IP by any means possible, any large company not being hacked by the Chinese should be asking: 'what are we doing wrong that the Chinese hackers are ignoring us?'.

Or "Why hasn't our IT/infosec department detecting the hacking that has presumably already happened?"

Yes, there is that too...

I'm sure we can expect this as a darknet diaries episode soon

wow this blog just got everything from the reuters article https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-cyber/bayer-says-ha...

Fun fact, Bayer bought Monsanto last year.

Yep, DW german news was covering it. Law suits against Monsanto were being settle after the buyout and a few people were talking about how American court were waiting until Monsanto was bought by the German before the suit is settle.

This is on top of the CEO of Bayer stating to the news media that he knew about Monsanto having a bad image. On top of the fact that Bayer sold HIV blood and supplied chemical during WWII for the Nazi.

>and supplied chemical during WWII for the Nazi.

IG Farben did a lot more then that. Among others buying people from concentration camps for medical studies which none of the "testsubjects" survived.

Yep.

https://ahrp.org/auschwitz60-year-anniversary-the-role-of-ig...

Next fun fact: Bayer and Monsanto together are now worth less than Monsanto alone at the time of the acquisition.

It seems two wrongs don't make a right.

What happened?

Too much evil spirit for a single company to contain. And they had to pay like 80M Eur in damages to a pensioner being related to Glyphosat being carcinogenic. This ruling may have set a precedent for the future.

US juries, after years of reluctance, spontaneously decide that Glyphosat is a killer and worth heavy punitive damages.

As soon as a foreign company bought Monsanto, that is.

I don't really mind the verdict itself, but the timing is more than a bit suspicious.

> I don't really mind the verdict itself, but the timing is more than a bit suspicious.

Yeah, that's definitely a bit weird. It's similar to when a government entity in the USA suddenly discovered the Diesel cheating just when big foreign car manufacturers had large successes in the US market. Even though it was made to look like it in the news, Volkswagen wasn't the biggest perpetrator [0]. And currently the US government puts major pressure onto the DTAG-Sprint merger and constantly comes up with new requirements, e.g. now they want DTAG to stop buying Huawei products world wide [1].

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Nitrogen...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sprint-corp-m-a-t-mobile-...

It wasn't like foreign autos weren't successful in the us until 5-10 years ago. BMW, Audi, VAG were not just suddenly crushing us companies.

Doesn't that mean, that Monsanto and Bayer were both hopelessly overvalued by the time of the acquisition? I wonder which other company-valuations are overblown only by the image a they have (cough ... facebook ... cough).

Metrics beyond "observables" -- assets, infrastructure, patents -- seem to be impossible, when considering investments, i.e. how much of these values are pure speculation (?). On the other hand -- these lawsuits were also "observable", but not really "measurable".

I'm a trucker. A few months ago I went to pick up some freight from "Bayer," at a distribution center, and it was consumer bottles of Roundup destined for a retail garden supply company.

I was a little confused, until I remembered "Oh yeah, right, Bayer bought Monsanto."

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