What does it mean when intelligence agencies claim that our healthcare companies have been hacked (or attempted) starting January 3rd?
(WSJ.com story – “U.S. Says Chinese, Iranian hackers Seek to Steal Coronavirus research”)
“The alert came as U.S. officials charge that China and Iran since at least Jan. 3 have waged cyberattacks against American firms and institutions that are working to find a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, officials said.”
Besides the angle of coronavirus research being attacked on January 3rd and the meaning of that, I am more interested in a general attack nature of the Chinese and Iranian Cyber attack units. Notice that whatever is important to the state firms will get a close look and if necessary they will steal and copy everything you have, just in case it can be useful either now or in the future.
Here is another point the article makes:
“The administration officials said one technique Iran has favored is so-called password spraying, a relatively unsophisticated hacking technique that attempts to compromise an organization by rapidly guessing common account-login passwords.”
We have seen this before:
Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that does not have good password strategies. And the hackers know this – so they will try these passwords first to see if the easy attack would work.
So if we are not working on the latest vials of the pandemic ‘cure’ or rather the vaccine research does that mean we are home free? Unfortunately it means if one entity tries to attack and can be successful, that just means that if the Chinese can attack then other hackers need to up their game so that they can attack successfully too.
If China can do it then others will emulate their success:
“Administration officials said China was the primary adversary conducting cyberattacks amid the coronavirus outbreak, with its attacks more widespread and frequent.”
There is only one thing to be done, and that is to get started on a Cyberdefense plan – the attackers will get more sophisticated , better at their craft – year after year. No one will be spared – as it is just as easy to attack 1 than to attack 1000 or a million.
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