Chinese
hackers
have stolen information from Spanish centers that are working on investigating a vaccine for covid-19, according to sources familiar with these cyberattacks.
The assaults on computer systems have been repeated in several countries competing in the race to obtain a remedy against the pandemic, as revealed on Thursday by the director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Paz Esteban, who added that their respective services secrets exchange information to avoid them, although he did not offer details.
The rough road to the covid vaccine
During a seminar organized by the Association of European Journalists (APE), the director of the Spanish service warned of the “qualitative and quantitative” growth of cyberattacks during confinement, given the extension of the “area of exposure” to this threat posed by the telework expansion.
And she underlined the cyberattacks against "sensitive sectors such as health and pharmaceuticals", as well as "a campaign, especially virulent, not only in Spain, against laboratories working in the search for a vaccine for covid-19."
The majority of these cyber attacks, according to the sources consulted, come from China and Russia.
In many cases these are state entities, but there are also universities and criminal organizations that trade with the stolen information.
In Spain, it is known that the cyber attack came from China.
The sources consulted have not revealed the importance or nature of the information stolen.
Last July, a federal court in Spokane, in the state of Washington, accused two Chinese citizens residing in Canton (China), Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, of hacking for more than a decade the systems of hundreds of high-tech companies , governments, NGOs and human rights activists in the US, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain.
In recent months, according to the indictment, "they investigated vulnerabilities in the computer networks of companies that develop COVID-19 vaccines, test technology and treatments" for the disease.
The
hackers
worked sometimes for their own benefit, but also collaborated with the MSS, the Ministry of Security of the Chinese state.
Researchers from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) that develop experimental vaccines against covid were summoned before the summer to a meeting to warn them to take precautions against possible theft of data, as confirmed by two of the attendees.
However, the heads of six of the Spanish groups that develop vaccine prototypes assure that they do not have any data theft in their computer systems.
The Danger of Homemade Coronavirus Vaccines
A CSIC spokesperson affirms that in their centers - the National Center for Biotechnology and the Margarita Salas Center for Biological Research, both in Madrid - there has been no theft.
Sources from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona claim to be unaware of any intrusion into the computers where the results of an experimental vaccine based on the genetic material of the new coronavirus are stored.
Neither do they recognize the theft of data at the National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA) or at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where José Manuel Martínez Costas' team investigates an original approach, based on a strategy of virus birds.
In Spain there are a dozen projects to develop vaccines against covid.
The most advanced are those led by the virologist Mariano Esteban, at the National Center for Biotechnology of the CSIC, and by the doctor Felipe García, at the Hospital Clínic.
None have yet started human trials.
There are currently 182 experimental vaccines against covid and 36 of them are already being tested in tens of thousands of volunteers, according to the registry of the World Health Organization.
The EU has booked more than 1.3 billion doses from six different projects, although none have yet proven their safety and efficacy.
Information about the coronavirus
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