BioNTech which is making the COVID-19 vaccines in partnership with Pfizer said its documents was accessed during the attack. EMA is currently working on approval of two COVID-19 vaccines and expecting it to conclude within weeks. This cyber-attack will not have an impact to that timeline, BioNTech said.

"Today, we were informed... that the agency has been subject to a cyber-attack and that some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed," BioNTech said in a statement on their website.

In October, a pharmaceutical company based in India was the victim of a significant cyber-attack. And in recent days, IBM said the cold storage supply chain used to transport viable vaccines had come under cyber-attack - probably by a nation state.