Research on the Covid-19 victim of hacking
A wave of cyber attacks recently targeted the computer vulnerabilities of companies developing a vaccine against Covid-19.
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Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow
4 min
Data from Covid-19 vaccine research laboratories are stirring up hackers' greed.
Indeed, attacks are increasing across the planet lately against hospitals and research laboratories.
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Hackings against hospitals and research laboratories engaged in the race for the vaccine against Covid-19 are increasing across the planet.
These intrusions smack of the Cold War, and brings us back to a time that was thought to be over, when the USSR and the United States spied on each other in military, technological and scientific fields.
Cyber attacks with sometimes disastrous consequences, which recently led to
the death of a patient in a university hospital in Germany
, a collateral victim of ransom and spyware that blocked the entire computer system of the establishment.
"
A strange war
"
The sophisticated attacks, the latest of which are called APT29, would be sponsored by Russia or China, according to cyber defense specialists.
These network mercenaries have allegedly hacked several American, British and Canadian research laboratories working on the development of an effective vaccine against Covid-19.
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These repeated intrusions into the information systems of pharmaceutical groups are qualified as state, because of their targeted characteristics and the means implemented by hackers
", explains Guillaume Gamelin, Regional Vice-President of F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity consultancy company.
“
Without speaking of geopolitics, we know that there are fronts a bit like in classical war.
This conflict in the digital world pits the United States against Russia or China and to a lesser extent North Korea.
In the midst of this cyber war, we find Europe.
When we qualify a state attack we mean a very specific attack that was carried out with the objective of stealing confidential information, for example, from a company.
It is often countries, states that attack companies.
Today, research on Covid-19 is in the sights, because if I am a foreign company and I manage to save a year of research and development to copy what has been done at a lower cost, I save time and competitiveness.
How do you identify pirates?
With the help of decoys that we call in our jargon “honeypots”, honeypots that make it possible to collect information on hackers and analyze the internet flows of their attacks between different countries.
"
Covid-19 and cyber threats
The intelligence services in the United States are categorical!
Russian hackers were well on the way to steal research data from the labs.
But the Kremlin brushed aside these accusations, saying it was just a maneuver to discredit Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine currently being tested in phase 3 on volunteers in the country.
The United States has also declared that its laboratories were targeted by Chinese and Iranian spies, but without providing formal proof.
The only certainty is that war, cyber and global, has long been declared.
It is now spreading across the world at the speed of the pandemic.
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