Abbott Sues for Cyber Attack
Abbott Laboratories has sued a French AIDS group for launching a cyber attack on its Web site that overloaded its server and interrupted business.
The suit filed in a French criminal court claims Act-Up Paris posted an Abbott link on its own Web site inviting activists to click to protest recent actions by the drug maker, the Wall Street Journal reports. Abbott says the overload shut its Web site down for about a half hour the night before an important shareholder meeting.
The newspaper calls the suit an “unusually aggressive legal move” in an industry that seeks to maintain respectful relationships with AIDS activists.
Abbott has angered AIDS activists by raising the price of one of its AIDS drugs by 400 percent and by pulling an improved AIDS drug from Thailand because of the country’s plan to infringe its patents.
