Is it the Democrats? Is it a Deep State plot?

Nope, it’s the Russians, as ever was.

Two British teams in an advanced stage of trialing Covid-19 vaccines, at Oxford University and Imperial College London, have been targeted by hackers. The National Cyber Security Center (part of GCHQ) said it had the “highest level of confidence” that the Kremlin was behind the hacking, which was confirmed by America’s National Security Agency and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment.

The hackers were identified as a group called APT-29, aka “Cozy Bear”, which has previously been behind cyber attacks on the Pentagon and the DNC. For the first time the group has been named as part of Russian intelligence.

On Wednesday researchers at Oxford said they had made a breakthrough in developing a vaccine, which they suggested could be in production as early as October. Then on Thursday the Russians announced that their vaccine would be approved in August, making it “possibly the first vaccine to be approved in the world”.

A Kremlin spokesman said: “We have no information on who could have hacked research centers in Britain.”


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...pted-steal-covid-19-vaccine-research-downing/
 
A vaccine for Covid-19, the Holy Grail for getting past the pandemic, is the single most precious piece of intellectual property that could exist today.

So two things inevitably follow: first, the world’s most sophisticated criminals and rogue states will throw everything they have at trying to steal the research; and second, protecting it is a matter of the utmost priority.

Thursday’s alert from the UK National Cyber Security Centre that a Russian hacking group known as APT-29 targeted vaccine research, in particular at Oxford and Imperial College London, is hardly the first such warning. In recent months the US government has accused Chinese and Iranian hackers of trying to steal vaccine research.

In response, the NCSC stepped up attempts to protect Britain’s vaccine research in May. But on Thursday, the centre said the hacking campaigns started as early as February, suggesting a window where protections may have fallen short of those needed.

As Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity researcher and consultant said: "These organisations do not prioritise cybersecurity, but research. This is unfortunate because they now find themselves on the front lines." There is a fear that overzealous standards could inhibit research.

The groups fingered as the culprits for the attack are no amateurs. APT-29 has been going for at least a decade, and was implicated in the hacking of top Democratic party officials’ emails ahead of the 2016 US election. The attackers are well funded and highly sophisticated. In protecting Britain’s vaccine research, we need to throw equal resources at stopping them.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technol...now-front-line-cyber-warfare-against-britain/


Alternatively, we could just ask JPP righties to assure us that this can’t be happening.
 
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