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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Exactly, just cut the undersea cables.

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.

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.

Here’s the news from Reuters

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

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

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.

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...