Company: VERA
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-029969
Chunk: 114

Company: Vera Therapeutics, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 114
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 and other major conflicts, we and our third-party partners (such as contract research organizations and clinical trial sites) may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of these attacks, including retaliatory cyber-attacks that could materially disrupt our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our services. 

We and our third-party partners are also subject to a variety of evolving threats, including but not limited to errors or malfeasance by personnel, malware (including as a result of advanced persistent threat intrusions), malicious code (such as viruses and worms), software vulnerabilities, hacking, denial of service attacks, credential stuffing, social-engineering attacks (including deep fakes, which may be increasingly more difficult to identify as fake, and phishing attacks), ransomware attacks, supply-chain attacks, software bugs, server malfunctions, software or hardware failures, loss of data or other information technology assets, adware, attacks enhanced or facilitated by AI, telecommunications failures, earthquakes, fires, floods and other similar threats.

In particular, severe ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly prevalent and can lead to significant interruptions in our operations, ability to provide our products or services, loss of sensitive information and income, reputational harm, and diversion of funds. Extortion payments may alleviate the negative impact of a ransomware attack, but we may be unwilling or unable to make such payments due to, for example, applicable laws or regulations prohibiting such payments. 

Remote work has become more common and has increased risks to our information technology systems and sensitive information, as more of our employees utilize network connections, computers, and devices outside our premises or network, including working at home, while in transit and in public locations. Additionally, future or past business transactions (such as acquisitions or integrations) could expose us to additional cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, as our systems could be negatively affected by vulnerabilities present in acquired or integrated entities’ systems and technologies. Furthermore, we may discover security issues that were not found during due diligence of such acquired or integrated entities, and it may be difficult to integrate companies into our information technology environment and security program.

In addition, our reliance upon third-party partners and technologies to operate critical business systems and to process sensitive information could introduce new cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, including supply-chain attacks, and other threats to our business operations. We rely on third-party partners in a variety of contexts, including, without limitation, third-party providers of cloud-based infrastructure, encryption and authentication technology, employee email, content delivery to customers, and other functions. We also rely on third