Coronavirus: US to accuse China of trying to hack vaccine research amid surge in cybertheft

Pointed allegation forms part of a deeper counter-strategy

US security agencies are preparing to issue a warning that China’s most skilled hackers and spies are working to steal American research in the crash effort to develop vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus. The efforts are part of a surge in cybertheft and attacks by nations seeking advantage in the pandemic.

The warning from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security comes as Israeli officials accuse Iran of mounting an effort in late April to cripple water supplies as Israelis were confined to their houses, though the government has offered no evidence to back its claim. More than a dozen countries have redeployed military and intelligence hackers to glean whatever they can about the virus responses of other nations. Even US allies like South Korea and nations that do not typically stand out for their cyber abilities, like Vietnam, have suddenly redirected their state-run hackers to focus on virus-related information, according to private security firms.

A draft of the forthcoming public warning, which officials say is likely to be issued in the days to come, says China is seeking “valuable intellectual property and public health data through illicit means related to vaccines, treatments and testing”. It focuses on cybertheft and action by “nontraditional actors”, a euphemism for researchers and students the Trump administration says are being activated to steal data from inside academic and private laboratories.

The decision to issue a specific accusation against China’s state-run hacking teams, current and former officials said, is part of a broader deterrent strategy that also involves US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. Under legal authorities that Donald Trump issued nearly two years ago, they have the power to bore deeply into Chinese and other networks to mount proportional counterattacks. This would be similar to their effort 18 months ago to strike at Russian intelligence groups seeking to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections and to put malware in the Russian power grid as a warning to Moscow for its attacks on US utilities.

But it is unclear exactly what the US has done, if anything, to fire a similar shot at the Chinese hacking groups, including those most closely tied to China’s new Strategic Support Force, its equivalent of Cyber Command, the Ministry of State Security and other intelligence units.

The forthcoming warning is also the latest iteration of a series of efforts by the Trump administration to blame China for being the source of the pandemic and exploiting its aftermath.

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, claimed this month that there was “enormous evidence” that the virus had come from a Chinese lab before backing off to say it had come from the “vicinity” of the lab in Wuhan. US intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue, but public evidence points to a link between the outbreak’s origins at a market in Wuhan and China’s illegal wildlife trafficking.

The State Department on Friday described a Chinese Twitter campaign to push false narratives and propaganda about the virus. Twitter executives have pushed back on the agency, noting that some of the Twitter accounts that the State Department cited were actually critical of Chinese state narratives.

But it is the search for vaccines that has been a particular focus, federal officials say.

“China’s long history of bad behaviour in cyberspace is well documented, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone they are going after the critical organisations involved in the nation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He added that the agency would “defend our interests aggressively“.

Last week, the US and Britain issued a joint warning that “health care bodies, pharmaceutical companies, academia, medical research organisations and local governments” had been targeted. While it named no specific countries – or targets – the wording was the kind used to describe the most active cyber-operators: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The hunt for spies seeking intellectual property has also accelerated. For months, FBI officials have been visiting major universities and presenting largely unclassified briefings about their vulnerabilities.

But some of those academic leaders and student groups have pushed back, comparing the rising paranoia about stolen research to the worst days of the Red Scare era. They particularly objected when Republican senator Tom Cotton declared last month on Fox News that it was “a scandal” that the US had “trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party’s brightest minds to go back to China”.

Security experts say that while there is a surge of attacks by Chinese hackers seeking an edge in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, or even effective treatment, the Chinese are hardly alone in seeking to exploit the virus.

Iranian hackers were also caught trying to get inside Gilead Sciences, the maker of remdesivir, the therapeutic drug approved 10 days ago by the Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials. Government officials and Gilead have refused to say if any element of the attack, which was first reported by Reuters, was successful.

Israel’s security advisers met last week for a classified session on a cyberattack on 24 and 25 April, which authorities were calling an attempt to cut off water supplies to rural parts of the country. The Israeli news media has widely blamed the attack on Iran, though they have offered no evidence in public. The effort was detected fairly quickly and did no damage, authorities said.

The rush to attribute the attack to Iran could be faulty. When a Saudi petrochemical plant was similarly attacked in 2017, Iran was presumed as the source of the effort to cause an industrial accident. It turned out to be coordinated from a Russian scientific institute.

The coronavirus has created whole new classes of targets. In recent weeks, Vietnamese hackers have directed their campaigns against Chinese government officials running point on the virus, according to cybersecurity experts.

South Korean hackers have taken aim at the World Health Organisation and officials in North Korea, Japan and the US. The attacks appeared to be attempts to compromise email accounts, most likely as part of a broad effort to gather intelligence on virus containment and treatment, according to two security experts for private firms who said they were not authorised to speak publicly. If so, the moves suggest that even allies are suspicious of official government accounting of cases and deaths around the world.

In interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and cybersecurity experts over the past month, many described a “free-for-all” that has spread even to countries with only rudimentary cyber ability.

“This is a global pandemic, but unfortunately countries are not treating it as a global problem,” said Justin Fier, a former national security intelligence analyst who is now the director of cyberintelligence at Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm. “Everyone is conducting widespread intelligence gathering – on pharmaceutical research, PPE orders, response – to see who is making progress.”

The frequency of cyberattacks and the spectrum of targets are “astronomical, off the charts,” Mr Fier said.

The New York Times