FBI Says Foreign States Hacked into U.S. Covid-19 Research Centers

https://www.sciencetechniz.com/2020/04/fbi-says-foreign-states-hacked-into-us.html

by sciencetech28 • 6 years ago

79 28 6 years ago

netsharc• 6 years ago

Is this a legitimate news site... or is it one of those "Bill Gates spread coronavirus to kill people, the evidence is he said we should reduce population growth rate and we interpreted it as him saying he wants to reduce the population" sites?

The fact that segments are repeated makes me think it's not a reputable site (in case they manage to fix it, screenshot as of the moment: https://i.imgur.com/M2Glm84.png). Also the poster's username on here is very similar to the site name...

Scipio_Afri• 6 years ago

Here’s the news from Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cyber-...

acqq2• 6 years ago

And there it sounds much less specific: "the bureau had recently seen state-backed hackers poking around."

newen• 6 years ago

Sadly enough, even if the FBI says it you will have to consider how much you trust the FBI first before believing it.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

How do you even know "a state" has hacked you and not someone in the public unless you find the hacker(s) in person.

save_ferris2• 6 years ago

It's so sad and frustrating that I wonder this every time I see a site with a fairly generic WP/Drupal/Whatever CMS theme and not a lot of background on the organization running it. But that's the reality of where the internet is today I guess.

mistermann2• 6 years ago

Meme war is hell.

Swenrekcah• 6 years ago

This segment repeating thing.

I see it on news sites all the time, so much so that I am starting to think it's done on purpose, but I can't imagine it does good things for SEO, there must be a penalty for repeat content (I would think)?

Maybe it's just sloppy copy/pasting...

Threeve303• 6 years ago

It's starting to feel like it would be news if it didn't happen

usrusr• 6 years ago

Right. Once a state has established a secretive organization to do nefarious things that org will keep doing, until it is disbanded and surprisingly often even after. They'll keep doing without too much thought about whether it makes sense on a political level, because those decisions are explicitly not their responsibility. In a closely related field it's not the army's job to decide whom to attack, it their job to be ready. The same applies to secretive orgs, they are just more difficult to control. Without decisive political effort to stop them when collaboration is preferred, intelligence people will keep gathering intelligence, propaganda people will keep invening lies, thought police will keep cracking down on communications (see the silencing of Dr Li Wenliang that was quickly rolled back once the topic escalated to people with decisionmaking in their job description) and offensive hackers will keep poking at servers. That's just how it is. It's not good at all, it's terrible, but it doesn't suddenly get worse than usual when it hits Covid-19 research. Surely the NSA wouldn't erase intercepted communications upon realizing that is about Covid-19, right?

boomboomsubban• 6 years ago

I imagine the FBI uncovered this by noticing US data in foreign states research centers.

leakybit• 6 years ago

Quite frankly, all covid-19 research should be made public especially if they received government funding.

anthony_doan• 6 years ago

I think the concern here is HIPPA where any PHI were leak

slowmovintarget• 6 years ago

The most concerning thing in my mind is not privacy or keeping the "IP", it is active interference with the research in the form of ransomware.

This would mean an attempt to stop or delay development of treatments and vaccines. That's evil.

cscurmudgeon• 6 years ago

I am curious where does it say that these hackers are white hat hackers releasing walled scientific information to the public for the greater good.

These seem like dangerous ransomware attacks from the very little information provided.

thelittleone• 6 years ago

What if researchers in one country develop 99/100 steps of a vaccine, but are not aware that they are one step away. Foreign government has access to all that research (because it’s free) and knows how to complete the one step and does so. They treat their people and either withhold or delay or complicate the proceeds of giving to rest of the world.

reaperducer• 6 years ago

I wonder what it would take for all or most of the nations of the world to get together an unplug another nation from the internet.

FriedPickles• 6 years ago

Would a coalition of nations be capable of enforcing that? Seems like text-only, high latency internet could be easily smuggled via satellite or terrestrial radio.

yumraj2• 6 years ago

Exactly, just cut the undersea cables.

save_ferris2• 6 years ago

Seems highly unlikely because there’d need to be global unanimity, right? Geopolitically, I don’t see a possible scenario for the West to convince everyone to kick someone off of the internet.

Say we wanted to cut off access to North Korea. The Chinese would never agree to that. We can’t even get that country to stop nuclear weapons tests, and that arguably has larger potential ramifications if they develop a legit ICBM.

yumraj2• 6 years ago

I think it's time to create a Great Firewall for the rest of the World

And while I agree that information related to covid-19 should be freely accessible, in this case we cannot assume that information was merely read and not modified due to whatever nefarious reasons the intruders may have.

thanksforfish• 6 years ago

Please, no. Hackers have no problem getting through the Great Firewall of China, it's to keep the average person away from certain information.

Use security in depth, and zero trust networks, not just perimeter defense.

FBI Says Foreign States Hacked into U.S. Covid-19 Research Centers

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