>>4888877 (notable PB #6241)
Bit of a continuation of the concept here. Merck's central computers got railed by ransomware from muh Russia. So sad. Because of that, they lost production aka profits. Something spoopy about this, let me explain why.
Cue matrix scene
"Drugs are not made…they're grown."
This (pic 1) is a bioreactor. In it, a bacterial stock is cultured, with the desired drug to be produced inside it. Let me restate: a bacteria is implanted with the drug molecule. When it divides, so does the drug in it. It gets transferred from a 100L reactor, to increasingly large o es, up to 30,000L, until.they have enough, when the culture is killed, drug centrifuges out, and a bucket of pure white powder is produced. Assuming you can keep Charlie sheen away, it's worth a low end of $400,000. Inputs are cheap once you have the initial culture, and start to finish is no more than 40 days. Most facilities run between 6 and 30 units, all at the same time. Do the math.
Thing is, these are hands off. Once the program is running, as long as you have input material, you have drugs. They all run off of these controllers
https://ab.rockwellautomation.com/Motor-Control/Motor-Control-Centers/IntelliCENTER-Integration-Unit
With a Windows 7 pro OS. That is old, and easy to breach. If a hacker locked out those, everything would come to a halt. The systems all have custom programming. It would take ages to replace and rewrite. If that's not what happened…maybe it should. With the money it can make, it's a hacker's gold mine. Or bitcoin mine. Either way.