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The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”

313 points by kimi 6y ago

bt1a 6y ago
I've always wondered how you can be so sure it's PRC in the age of easily being able to mask your true IP address. Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC, or another option is that the actors were not as covert as they thought. Like remember the indictment of 12 russians ( https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download ) The FBI linked a pool of bitcoins used to purchase a VPN service and other things to the Russians. Probably best to not use a crypto with a public ledger for criminal activity.
- Aaronstotle 6y ago
  Should have used Monero
- toshk 6y ago
  Same here. I remember once I was watching the news and they claimed a hack was done by Russians because they found Russian comments in the code. That didn't sound very convincing :). The ledger evidence sounds better. At the same time in this case I would be more surprised if the PRC , since their need for control, and since the stakes are extremely high, wasn't doing such things.
  - bt1a 6y ago
    Exactly my friend, seems like it'd be trivial to leave misleading clues.
  - toshk 6y ago
    Was googling to see if I could find a news article to back up my memory. Instead I found an article on Wikileaks claiming CIA executed false flag hacking operations: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the-cia-repurposing-foreign-hacking-code-to-save-time-not-to-frame-russia/ https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the...
    - thephyber 6y ago
      Which is another reason why attribution of cyber incidents is notoriously difficult. The CIA is hardly the only organization to put misleading evidence in their attack path. Also, countries like China and Russia have healthy malware ecosystems so a Chinese-written malware can end up in the payload of a {North Korean, Russian, Iranian} cyber attack. Personally, I'm starting to believe that the only way to have extremely high confidence in attributing an attack is to have surveillance of the person on the source keyboard when it happens or to have telecom evidence of people admitting what they did. Most of the actual attack is probably robotic at this point.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    Similarly, I recall a strain of malware being attributed to Chinese hackers because variable names were in Chinese; then when you actually inspect the code, it's clearly Unicode gibberish generated by an obfuscator... That is to say, the hackers weren't even trying to be misleading, it was just a result of obfuscation reminiscent of mojibake. (I read the article on Ars Technica but don't remember enough details to find the article.) If I ever code a hacking tool I'll throw in some Korean comments for sure.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      Do spanish instead... represent!
    - darawk 6y ago
      Do keep in mind that intelligence services are probably not being fully transparent about how they know the source of an attack. They wouldn't want to reveal their methods, to avoid them becoming unreliable in the future.
      - vkou 6y ago
        Which makes it impossible to have an open, informed discussion on the subject. Instead, you get tribalist arguments over who believes which secret police.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I think sometimes they just blame whoever suits the political narrative. The Chinese replaced the Russians as the boogeyman de jour a short while back, so of course they will now be blamed by default.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC I'm sure the PRC has used password spraying before, the only detail mentioned. Tgatd about as easily forged as the IP address though.
- kube-system 6y ago
  An IP address is merely one of thousands of ways that you could identify the source of network traffic.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    And I'm guessing most of the time the "thousands of ways" don't all point in the same direction.
  - dkn775 6y ago
    Would you be willing to share some good resources for identifying rework traffic beyond IP? I have seen things in my little snitch logs I wonder about but no real recourse.
- heipei 6y ago
  First of all, the IC works with estimative language, i.e. "with a high degree of confidence", which everyone understands on what to make of it and how it should inform policy (I know, policy is different than a criminal investigation). To your question: Imagine tracking these threat actors for years (or decades). You have observed different TTPs (Techniques, Tactics & Procedures) from different actors, you see them operating in different ways and with different teams, you can observe the time when they are active, by their targeting you can make an educated guess what they're after, you can correlate their activity with policy changes in their presumed home-countries and lastly you can repeat those observations over and over again since these threat actors are persistent and keep coming back since it's their job. If all these soft and passive observations already point to the same actor(s), and then you get some additional hard evidence on top (Opsec failures, HUMINT, SIGINT), you are eventually able to make a verdict with a high degree of confidence.
elliekelly 6y ago
I appreciate that there’s probably a lot I don’t know or understand about the national security aspects of this but it seems wrong to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. Protecting security interests is one thing but this press release specifically mentions protecting intellectual property and that seems kind of tone deaf. I also wish they would explain how treatment options are jeopardized, even at a high level: > The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options.
- natechols 6y ago
  I take it you've never worked in information security, because cleaning up after a mess like this is an enormous time suck and they will need to audit their data to make sure it hasn't been "adjusted". (From a national security perspective, I bet derailing a competitor's vaccine trials is at least as valuable as "stealing" data that was already going to become public in the near future.) That means spending time and money that would be better spent doing just about anything else, if it weren't for human nature.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  First, it lists "affiliated with COVID-19-related research" not "exclusively COVID-19 research" so could be more than just the current research. More importantly, while data theft is bad, data tampering could be much worse. What happens to people's confidence, hope, and trust if a "remarkably effective" drug turns out to be a total dud or even dangerous because the underlying data was modified?
- cat199 6y ago
  > to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. this presumes that the stolen information would be used 'to help as many people as possible'.. Also, 1st country with viable vaccine/treatment/etc will have a huge geopolitical bargaining chip & it will likely be used as such no matter the country of origin.
  - 6y ago
coliveira 6y ago
This is information that can save lives, so I support any nation to hack on COVID research, anywhere in the world. If they patent COVID research, I also support breaking any patent.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Until the fairly recent proliferation of trade agreements that are negotiated out of the view of the public, the investor relations and patent/copyright clauses that prevented the sharing of medical information were not common and were routinely broken by most developing nations. The business community's wishes had no power there, and quite arguably when it comes to medicine, it is a crime against the people to withhold lifesaving information. In fact, until the US became top dog in the post-war era, we pirated everything we could from England, especially industrial know-how so that we could promote our own development. It is only after we reached hegemonic status that we started enforcing these ludicrous agreements in order to preserve our own businesses' position.
  - natechols 6y ago
    This is a gross misunderstanding of what patent and copyright actually mean - specifically, they exist to encourage sharing of information, not secrecy. They require full disclosure by definition, so you can't patent a trade secret without revealing it to everyone. There's a period of exclusivity (~20 years), which is very different from "withholding information", but that's only after the IP has been published.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      They exist to encourage sharing of information in the context of a private marketplace. Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. If anything, competition would be better if there were no patents. If employers could simply poach key employees by offering good salaries, they would get that information quite easily.
pessimizer 6y ago
Why would they be press-releasing this other than to drive public opinion against China?
- mcphage 6y ago
  To publicize the fact that these sort of attacks can be tracked. Similar to when they publish information about particularly crafty drug houses they bust: so that people planning on building a drug house think "well, if they got that house, then they'll definitely find out the one I'm planning, so maybe I'd better not."
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    This doesn't demonstrate that these kinds of attacks can be tracked though. If I were planning similar attacks, I'd just acquire a Chinese IP address and assume they'd take the blame.
    - mcphage 6y ago
      That's true... the FBI probably never considered that possibility.
- bt1a 6y ago
  While the admin is currently pushing a very negative image against China, I do not believe the FBI would do that so lightly.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Why would the FBI be hesitant about faking/sensationalizing this? It's nearly impossible to prove, China's unlikely to make an issue out of it, and even if the lie got exposed what punishment would they face?
    - Larrikin 6y ago
      Are you an infosec expert? You have said that it is impossible to trace origins of hacks multiple times but only offer two shallow points that you would learn about in your first week of a network security class. There are papers out there that have multiple ways of using language to identify specific authors, determine multiple authors, and even decode unknown language. That's my first shallow example and would be a pretty reliable indicator if you could get your hands on their code. With a budget of millions of dollar I'm sure they have dozens of ways that can be combined. It would make no sense to reveal every single method they use to defend against people on the internet. That also assumes they don't just have a mole who told them about it, which they also wouldn't reveal.
pcbro141 6y ago
Shouldn't all countries be working together openly on fighting the pandemic? Given that it's hurting the whole world.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It's not hurting the whole world equally. It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA. As long as this goes on it benefits China very greatly. We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership.
  - blhack 6y ago
    What an unbelievably low effort comment. >It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA. Ranked next to Western European countries, the US ranks at the bottom of worst effected. The worst effected country is Belgium, followed by France, Italy, the UK, Sweden, and so on. As far as CFR, the US is about 1/3 or Belgium, and about 1/2 of the Netherlands. Among western liberal democracies, the US is among the safest/best place to be right now with regards to health outcomes related to the coronavirus. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality >We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership. This is simply not true, and the evidence of it not being true is echoed at every reasonable metric. People are increasingly storing their money in the US (as evidenced by the stock market refusing to collapse), and increasingly following along with US-led pullbacks against global organizations like the WHO. China is rapidly losing its ability to enact soft power anywhere in the world. We are also only gaining in economic power: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-03-31/comeback-nation https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-0... -- The US coronavirus response has been one of the strongest among western nations, our economy has weathered this better than anywhere in the world, and we will likely come out of this crisis even stronger, with even more global power, than we went in.
    - gowld 6y ago
      US is 9/10 on the graph of worst 10. Scroll down past the top 10 worst countries, to see all the countries with lower death rate.
ezVoodoo 6y ago
Of course! China is very good at stealing things which the US does not possess. Last time it was the 5G technology, remember?
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Comment history https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ezVoodoo https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ezVoodoo
  - ezVoodoo 6y ago
    What about my comment history? Do facts scare you? Can you not bear the pain to watch the video which shows something contradicting to the information you receive from your media?
tehjoker 6y ago
I can't recall the last time I saw a public statement by the FBI that wasn't a lie used for some nefarious purpose.
- chrononaut 6y ago
  The FBI lists _many_ public statements per day about all sorts of operations and arrests: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel What you're encountering might just be a selection effect since many of these press releases don't raise people's interests. Perhaps it's the people amplifying certain stories to drive their narrative than the FBI themselves?
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    The FBI is a highly political organization that uses its position of authority to routinely intervene in politics often at the behest of the state. Usually I list the interference they do in left wing movements where they spy and infiltrate spaces to disrupt and discredit vital activities aimed at e.g. preserving the environment. As a highlight, they tried to get MLK to kill himself. Much of this was documented by the revelations of COINTELPRO. That stuff was never punished, so why would they ever stop? It's good for the integrity of the state. For a conservative example, the recent "Obamagate" disclosures show how the FBI was instrumental in creating the now totally discredited Russiagate conspiracy which raged in the media for two years as a ploy to disrupt the Trump administration by an insane xenophobic conspiracy that Trump was the manchurian candidate, going so far as to create speculation that he was some kind of soviet sleeper agent from the 1980s. He's of course a bad guy, but this stuff is off the wall. Now the FBI is being brought under control by the current administration which is attempting to distract from it's total failure to respond to the pandemic and its actions which are widely acknowledged to have made it far worse that it should have been. The United States, the richest most powerful country in the world, has had one of the worst responses in the world. So the administration is attempting to clumsily pin the blame on a "foreign enemy" by saying it's attempting unfairly to do something about the pandemic. What an incredible world we live in. EDIT: To conclude: Is withholding medical information in a pandemic for any reason ethical? What about for making money? Is stealing such information from such an actor unethical?
narrator 6y ago
If the PRC gets a workable vaccine first, they can gain influence to get everyone to use a WHO run global vaccine passport instead of separate national systems. They can then tie the WHO's databank into their global surveillance system and franchise out China's surveillance state and social credit score system throughout the world.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  Those are good points, I'd add two more: - "If you want to buy our vaccine, you need to buy Huawei equipment for all your communications systems" - we've already seen that in France with PPE - What would that do for investment in vaccine research if you know China can drop in theirs at any time and address the entire market? Investments dries up, China pulls back, go back to 1.
skrebbel 6y ago
I love the term "cyber actor". That's basically like Hugh Jackman and Jonny Lee Miller, right?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- scollet 6y ago
  And my favourite: Rami Malek
orbifold 6y ago
Just for additional context several super computing sites in Europe were attacked a few weeks ago and are still down, among them PizDaint at CSCS, which ranks 6th in the world, several super computing sites in Germany (FZ Juelich) and so on. I think no-one wishes this to turn into a kinetic war, but for all we know besides the economic warfare that has been going on for quite some time, this feels like we are in an all out conflict with China.
- RobertoG 6y ago
  we are in all out conflict with China because some super computing sites were "attacked"? That's not a very responsible statement.
  - orbifold 6y ago
    Well this is clearly a hostile act during a time in which several European countries have declared medical emergencies. They were not just "attacked" but have been completely offline for almost two weeks now (https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/18/hacking-streak-forces-european-supercomputers-offline-in-midst-of-covid-19-research-effort/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/18/hacking-streak-forces-eur...). In Germany it is (incident was 15.05) - NEMO (Freiburg) - bwUniCluster 2.0 and ForHLR II (Karlsruhe) - Hawk (Stuttgart) - Leibniz Supercomputing Center (Munich) - JURECA, JUWELS und JUDAC (FZ Jülich) - Taurus (Dresden) Switzerland shutdown access to all of CSCS (16.05).
    - goodcjw2 6y ago
      Facts: 1 - HPC centers in Europes are down. 2 - Those are useful resources to battle battle against COVID-19. 3 - HPC centers are down due to malware infections. 4 - FBI warned and Department of Homeland Security warns of possible cyberattacks targeting COVID-19 research.
      - acqq 6y ago
        And in the linked article the probable cause is much more prosaic: "The attacks may have been perpetrated in order to mine cryptocurrency; investigations are ongoing."
smkellat 6y ago
If you’re doing research of any significance in today’s world and don’t have an active security program looking for harmful actions by foreign intelligence your organization opens itself up for all sorts of nasty liabilities. You don’t even have to have an electronic intrusion. The PRC’s government also pays people off as the case of this former Cleveland Clinic researcher shows: https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland-clinic-researcher-charged-with-fraud-for-failing-to-disclose-china-ties.html https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland-cli...
- vsareto 6y ago
  What kind of liabilities? That looks like a case against an individual. Are you talking human counter-intelligence as well as IT security?
  - akiselev 6y ago
    Imagine a state actor hitting the contract research organization in charge of the last phase of a clinical trial for a blood pressure medication and changing data. Due to the nature of double blind trials, catching these modifications can become really hard to catch and could lead to a lot of human suffering.
    - La1n 6y ago
      If they target a CRO the sponsor still has the original data from the trial sites. I can say that at least for the company (one of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies) I work for this would almost be impossible to not be caught.
      - Icathian 6y ago
        Even the crappy little cowboy CRO I worked for had a fleet of CRA's go out and manually verify documents against the EDC. It's required by law. I think the FDA audit also repeats that process with a random sampling for some studies, though I couldn't swear to that. I get the point the parent comment was trying to make, but yeah, bad example.
troughway 6y ago
There is a big business opportunity, which I am sure is already fulfilled to some extent, to provide air-gap and other securities/countermeasures to businesses and orgs that deal with highly sensitive data, equipment, specimens, whatever. Something akin to an anti-Palantir.
tarkin2 6y ago
This press release encourages me to think China is covering up something. This /may/ be the case. But the FBI wants me to come to this conclusion. It seems a little fishy.
jhpriestley 6y ago
US Intelligence has released the following images of mobile bioweapons production labs, could they be in use by PRC to create Covid? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory#/media/File:Powell_UN_Iraq_presentation,_alleged_Mobile_Production_Facilities.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory#/med...
jorblumesea 6y ago
So the country that the virus originated from can't/doesn't even want to research vaccines properly? Or is this economic warfare to stop the West from producing a viable vaccine? Feels increasing likely that the real global virus here is the CCP.
horsemessiah 6y ago
How can western leaders condemn China's lack of publishing info related to COVID-19 and protect private research for curing it at the same time? Research like this should be public and accessible to everyone. I don't know why I shouldn't applaud any hackers spreading this information.
- pedroma 6y ago
  Companies will stop working on it the moment they lose incentive, etc etc.
dheera 6y ago
Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for saying this, but I feel I need to say it. I don't think COVID-19 research should be secretive, I think it should be a global effort, and I'm perfectly happy with the idea of any nation having open access to all COVID-19 research, vaccines, results, and (anonymized) data. There should NOT be a concept of intellectual property when there are people dying in droves from a disease. Please, China, Italy, Spain, everywhere, scoop up all the COVID-19 research you can find and act upon it to save lives. Copy ideas. Copy drugs. Re-do and verify tests. Immediately. Don't mind the courts. They suck, and are sitting in armchairs killing people by delaying the effort and enforcing intellectual "property".
- spacephysics 6y ago
  Before sanctioning stealing, perhaps the problem is two fold. China wants to have the first vaccine for: * Becoming the first to market, to try and salvage their reputation * Using the vaccine as leverage toward the incoming sanctions for violating the Hong Kong treaty during UK handover, as well as the now-declared possible non-peaceful reunification of Taiwan * monetary gain * leverage against the US restricting/removing Chinese’s companies from the NASDAQ I agree research should be open, but it’s hard to say to what degree, and how that might effect the economics of it. Whether we like it or not, capitalistic driven progress requires a reward, and one of the few reasons pharmaceutical companies will take the risk of finding a vaccine is the potential for increased reputation, and being first to market. Without those incentives, it’s straightforward to not to take a massive monetary risk as others are all working on similar problems, thus the likelihood that your lab will be the first is slim. Further, the crisis is a worldwide pandemic, but if the rate of natural immunity is as high as some predict, the efficacy of these vaccines may lead to less ‘sales’ than initially expected. Oxford running out of people to test their vaccine on: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-25/COVID-19-disappearing-so-fast-vaccine-has-50-chance-of-working-QMLMMAUWJO/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-25/COVID-19-disappearing-... China report about Taiwan has “peaceful” removed: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-taiwan/china-drops-word-peaceful-in-latest-push-for-taiwan-reunification-idUSKBN22Y06S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-taiwan/c... China breaking the handover treaty: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/china-hong-kong-pandemic-autonomy-law-aggression/611983/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/ch...
unclebucknasty 6y ago
Yeah, but our kids can still all use TikTok, right? That's the important thing here.
NGRhodes 6y ago
Related: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomputer_cyberattack/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomp... "One of Britain's most powerful academic supercomputers has fallen victim to a "security exploitation" of its login nodes, forcing the rewriting of all user passwords and SSH keys." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_research_hacking/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_researc... "Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) cautioned of a “password spraying” campaign targeting healthcare and medical research organisations."
- dntbnmpls 6y ago
  > Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning. I have a hard time believing foreign state hackers are using "script kiddie" tactics. But that's just me.
btrettel 6y ago
Some of the comments here discuss how an attacker could tamper with data. What are some good ways for a scientist to ensure the integrity of their data in this case? Post it online with a hash, particularly in a way that will get archived by others? Keep off-site backups?
- g_p 6y ago
  Where it's possible, perhaps using a deterministic process that can be easily repeated to verify the groupings haven't been tampered with? (Not to reduce the importance of backups, though they themselves can be attacked, but just as an idea for discussion...) Here's an idea for how this could work for an example given elsewhere in the thread about the risk of an attacker mislabelling the subjects so the outcomes are unclear or deliberately skewed. For a binary double-blind placebo trial (one group gets the medication, another gets the placebo), compute the hmac of each subject identifier (name, some participant ID), keyed with a key known to the principal investigator. Everyone whose hash MSB is above 0x80 gets the treatment, and everyone whose hash is below 0x80 gets the placebo. If you need more experimental groups, adjust the thresholds as needed Clearly this is very restrictive and limited (you might need to ensure a proper demographic and medical/age profile distribution of subjects between both groups), but there are likely ways to achieve this by creating multiple "groups" and doing this process within each demographic balanced group. You'd get a reproducible outcome, as long as you can recover the patient names or participant ID numbers, and the PI or experimental lead takes careful note of the hmac key used. Just a straw man idea for how at least the patient to group allocation could be done deterministically. If someone attacked this and muddled patients and groups around, it could be reproduced just from knowing who the subjects are, and the hmac key. Clearly this doesn't scale to results or beyond, but I imagine this is where digital signatures start to help. And with modern ed25519 signatures we aren't talking massive signatures either.
tehwebguy 6y ago
I mean, who cares? If they aren’t altering data let them read it. We are surely reading theirs too.
- nineparts 6y ago
  Why would we read it? It's just a copy of our data + some propaganda.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Have family that work in encryption, you can think of barriers to entry as orders of magnitude in cost. AWS can decipher decade old encryption standards for about $100k brute computational cost. Nation states have access to 5-8 zeros of effort if it is valuable enough. Private entities have no chance against nation-state backed hacking efforts. It’s one-sided or ‘asymmetric’, because western intelligence refuses to share commercial intelligence with western businesses (probably because there isn’t much of value to share... yet). Only solution is political change.
OBLIQUE_PILLAR 6y ago
COVID-19 affects the entire world. Shouldn't all COVID-19 basically be done on a globally viewable wiki? It's going to take the cooperation of all countries to get through it. I don't understand why the US should hoard any COVID-19 data it has, besides extremely non altruistic ones.
- mc32 6y ago
  Let’s see who else is putting valuable IP it out there.
737min 6y ago
Does anyone really wonder if we (the US) and China are going to be at war in the next 10 years?
- nineparts 6y ago
  I come from an ex-communist country. So this is probably (hopefully) the only moment my talent of spotting this kind of shit is useful. The thing is that whatever bad behavior the USA committed in the past, and then anxiously analyzed and mulled over for decades... the Chinese are doing day by day, routinely, without ANY remorse or second thought. With the Russians it was different. Sorry to say this, but compared to the Chinese, they had soul. I do not foresee anything like the collapse of the Soviet Union in China. They are too "rational" for it. Not to mention their numbers. Our only hope is Jesus Christ. US and China at war? I don't know. China at war? By their logic of expansion, I'm afraid it is guaranteed.
  - yibg 6y ago
    Seems strange to me to assign any emotion to the political entity of a huge country. I don’t even mean what it means. What does China / America/ Soviet Union feeling remorse even look like? History has shown us that any super power will go to war. The Romans, the British, the Americans. Maybe we’ve learned our lesson from history or maybe today things are different due to greater education, multiculturalism and just rapid communication. Either way we shouldn’t be pinning our hopes on “Jesus Christ”, as again I don’t know what that means. Would he come down and disarm everyone or something? We avoid conflict by having rational open dialog, educating people and increasing transparency and accountability. The way to increase the probability of conflict is by having this tribalistic us vs them mentality. Everything they do is bad, they are evil and we are just.
    - nineparts 6y ago
      When that political party is set on dictating not only how every citizen but how every ethnic should behave... well...
  - andarleen 6y ago
nineparts 6y ago
I know I might be the weirdo here for browsing 4chon, but for the last few months I have seen a huge incursion of "PRC-affiliated"... "contributions"... and not only to high traffic and high turnover boards but even to niche ones. On boards using flags, these "contributions" come mainly from Canada, USA, and France. Although I am secretly grateful for this spam, as it cut down my time spent there from 3-4 hours a week to 3-4 hours a month, it's still disconcerting as they are highly organized and apparently take huge pleasure in bludgeoning seals and other harmless creatures. Heck, I am amazed that the boards were clean even after the US Elections, the shutdown of 8chon and other such events.
asdkljas 6y ago
Reading through the comments, either muricans are so dumb. Or PRC/CCP has put their hands here. CCP are worse than the nazis, speaking as a Chinese.
737min 6y ago
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two-paths-global-domination-cold-war/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two-pa...

313 points by kimi 6y ago

bt1a 6y ago

I've always wondered how you can be so sure it's PRC in the age of easily being able to mask your true IP address. Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC, or another option is that the actors were not as covert as they thought. Like remember the indictment of 12 russians ( https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download ) The FBI linked a pool of bitcoins used to purchase a VPN service and other things to the Russians. Probably best to not use a crypto with a public ledger for criminal activity.

Aaronstotle 6y ago
Should have used Monero
toshk 6y ago
Same here. I remember once I was watching the news and they claimed a hack was done by Russians because they found Russian comments in the code. That didn't sound very convincing :). The ledger evidence sounds better. At the same time in this case I would be more surprised if the PRC , since their need for control, and since the stakes are extremely high, wasn't doing such things.
- bt1a 6y ago
  Exactly my friend, seems like it'd be trivial to leave misleading clues.
- toshk 6y ago
  Was googling to see if I could find a news article to back up my memory. Instead I found an article on Wikileaks claiming CIA executed false flag hacking operations: https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the-cia-repurposing-foreign-hacking-code-to-save-time-not-to-frame-russia/ https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the...
  - thephyber 6y ago
    Which is another reason why attribution of cyber incidents is notoriously difficult. The CIA is hardly the only organization to put misleading evidence in their attack path. Also, countries like China and Russia have healthy malware ecosystems so a Chinese-written malware can end up in the payload of a {North Korean, Russian, Iranian} cyber attack. Personally, I'm starting to believe that the only way to have extremely high confidence in attributing an attack is to have surveillance of the person on the source keyboard when it happens or to have telecom evidence of people admitting what they did. Most of the actual attack is probably robotic at this point.
- oefrha 6y ago
  Similarly, I recall a strain of malware being attributed to Chinese hackers because variable names were in Chinese; then when you actually inspect the code, it's clearly Unicode gibberish generated by an obfuscator... That is to say, the hackers weren't even trying to be misleading, it was just a result of obfuscation reminiscent of mojibake. (I read the article on Ars Technica but don't remember enough details to find the article.) If I ever code a hacking tool I'll throw in some Korean comments for sure.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Do spanish instead... represent!
  - darawk 6y ago
    Do keep in mind that intelligence services are probably not being fully transparent about how they know the source of an attack. They wouldn't want to reveal their methods, to avoid them becoming unreliable in the future.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Which makes it impossible to have an open, informed discussion on the subject. Instead, you get tribalist arguments over who believes which secret police.
GordonS 6y ago
I think sometimes they just blame whoever suits the political narrative. The Chinese replaced the Russians as the boogeyman de jour a short while back, so of course they will now be blamed by default.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
>Perhaps the identified attacks have been previously linked with the PRC I'm sure the PRC has used password spraying before, the only detail mentioned. Tgatd about as easily forged as the IP address though.
kube-system 6y ago
An IP address is merely one of thousands of ways that you could identify the source of network traffic.
- thephyber 6y ago
  And I'm guessing most of the time the "thousands of ways" don't all point in the same direction.
- dkn775 6y ago
  Would you be willing to share some good resources for identifying rework traffic beyond IP? I have seen things in my little snitch logs I wonder about but no real recourse.
heipei 6y ago
First of all, the IC works with estimative language, i.e. "with a high degree of confidence", which everyone understands on what to make of it and how it should inform policy (I know, policy is different than a criminal investigation). To your question: Imagine tracking these threat actors for years (or decades). You have observed different TTPs (Techniques, Tactics & Procedures) from different actors, you see them operating in different ways and with different teams, you can observe the time when they are active, by their targeting you can make an educated guess what they're after, you can correlate their activity with policy changes in their presumed home-countries and lastly you can repeat those observations over and over again since these threat actors are persistent and keep coming back since it's their job. If all these soft and passive observations already point to the same actor(s), and then you get some additional hard evidence on top (Opsec failures, HUMINT, SIGINT), you are eventually able to make a verdict with a high degree of confidence.

elliekelly 6y ago

I appreciate that there’s probably a lot I don’t know or understand about the national security aspects of this but it seems wrong to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. Protecting security interests is one thing but this press release specifically mentions protecting intellectual property and that seems kind of tone deaf. I also wish they would explain how treatment options are jeopardized, even at a high level: > The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options.

natechols 6y ago
I take it you've never worked in information security, because cleaning up after a mess like this is an enormous time suck and they will need to audit their data to make sure it hasn't been "adjusted". (From a national security perspective, I bet derailing a competitor's vaccine trials is at least as valuable as "stealing" data that was already going to become public in the near future.) That means spending time and money that would be better spent doing just about anything else, if it weren't for human nature.
caseysoftware 6y ago
First, it lists "affiliated with COVID-19-related research" not "exclusively COVID-19 research" so could be more than just the current research. More importantly, while data theft is bad, data tampering could be much worse. What happens to people's confidence, hope, and trust if a "remarkably effective" drug turns out to be a total dud or even dangerous because the underlying data was modified?
cat199 6y ago
> to not share as much information as possible with as many researchers as possible in order to help as many as people as possible. this presumes that the stolen information would be used 'to help as many people as possible'.. Also, 1st country with viable vaccine/treatment/etc will have a huge geopolitical bargaining chip & it will likely be used as such no matter the country of origin.
- 6y ago

coliveira 6y ago

This is information that can save lives, so I support any nation to hack on COVID research, anywhere in the world. If they patent COVID research, I also support breaking any patent.

tehjoker 6y ago
Until the fairly recent proliferation of trade agreements that are negotiated out of the view of the public, the investor relations and patent/copyright clauses that prevented the sharing of medical information were not common and were routinely broken by most developing nations. The business community's wishes had no power there, and quite arguably when it comes to medicine, it is a crime against the people to withhold lifesaving information. In fact, until the US became top dog in the post-war era, we pirated everything we could from England, especially industrial know-how so that we could promote our own development. It is only after we reached hegemonic status that we started enforcing these ludicrous agreements in order to preserve our own businesses' position.
- natechols 6y ago
  This is a gross misunderstanding of what patent and copyright actually mean - specifically, they exist to encourage sharing of information, not secrecy. They require full disclosure by definition, so you can't patent a trade secret without revealing it to everyone. There's a period of exclusivity (~20 years), which is very different from "withholding information", but that's only after the IP has been published.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    They exist to encourage sharing of information in the context of a private marketplace. Most useful technology is created by state-funded research over decades. The private sector just monopolizes the results. If anything, competition would be better if there were no patents. If employers could simply poach key employees by offering good salaries, they would get that information quite easily.

pessimizer 6y ago

Why would they be press-releasing this other than to drive public opinion against China?

mcphage 6y ago
To publicize the fact that these sort of attacks can be tracked. Similar to when they publish information about particularly crafty drug houses they bust: so that people planning on building a drug house think "well, if they got that house, then they'll definitely find out the one I'm planning, so maybe I'd better not."
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  This doesn't demonstrate that these kinds of attacks can be tracked though. If I were planning similar attacks, I'd just acquire a Chinese IP address and assume they'd take the blame.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    That's true... the FBI probably never considered that possibility.
bt1a 6y ago
While the admin is currently pushing a very negative image against China, I do not believe the FBI would do that so lightly.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Why would the FBI be hesitant about faking/sensationalizing this? It's nearly impossible to prove, China's unlikely to make an issue out of it, and even if the lie got exposed what punishment would they face?
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    Are you an infosec expert? You have said that it is impossible to trace origins of hacks multiple times but only offer two shallow points that you would learn about in your first week of a network security class. There are papers out there that have multiple ways of using language to identify specific authors, determine multiple authors, and even decode unknown language. That's my first shallow example and would be a pretty reliable indicator if you could get your hands on their code. With a budget of millions of dollar I'm sure they have dozens of ways that can be combined. It would make no sense to reveal every single method they use to defend against people on the internet. That also assumes they don't just have a mole who told them about it, which they also wouldn't reveal.

pcbro141 6y ago

Shouldn't all countries be working together openly on fighting the pandemic? Given that it's hurting the whole world.

jeffbee 6y ago
It's not hurting the whole world equally. It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA. As long as this goes on it benefits China very greatly. We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership.
- blhack 6y ago
  What an unbelievably low effort comment. >It's been far worse for countries peopled with and led by idiots, like the USA. Ranked next to Western European countries, the US ranks at the bottom of worst effected. The worst effected country is Belgium, followed by France, Italy, the UK, Sweden, and so on. As far as CFR, the US is about 1/3 or Belgium, and about 1/2 of the Netherlands. Among western liberal democracies, the US is among the safest/best place to be right now with regards to health outcomes related to the coronavirus. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality >We've already seen a huge shift away from the idea of American global leadership. This is simply not true, and the evidence of it not being true is echoed at every reasonable metric. People are increasingly storing their money in the US (as evidenced by the stock market refusing to collapse), and increasingly following along with US-led pullbacks against global organizations like the WHO. China is rapidly losing its ability to enact soft power anywhere in the world. We are also only gaining in economic power: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-03-31/comeback-nation https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-0... -- The US coronavirus response has been one of the strongest among western nations, our economy has weathered this better than anywhere in the world, and we will likely come out of this crisis even stronger, with even more global power, than we went in.
  - gowld 6y ago
    US is 9/10 on the graph of worst 10. Scroll down past the top 10 worst countries, to see all the countries with lower death rate.

ezVoodoo 6y ago

Of course! China is very good at stealing things which the US does not possess. Last time it was the 5G technology, remember?

ryanmarsh 6y ago
Comment history https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ezVoodoo https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ezVoodoo
- ezVoodoo 6y ago
  What about my comment history? Do facts scare you? Can you not bear the pain to watch the video which shows something contradicting to the information you receive from your media?

tehjoker 6y ago

I can't recall the last time I saw a public statement by the FBI that wasn't a lie used for some nefarious purpose.

chrononaut 6y ago
The FBI lists _many_ public statements per day about all sorts of operations and arrests: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel What you're encountering might just be a selection effect since many of these press releases don't raise people's interests. Perhaps it's the people amplifying certain stories to drive their narrative than the FBI themselves?
- tehjoker 6y ago
  The FBI is a highly political organization that uses its position of authority to routinely intervene in politics often at the behest of the state. Usually I list the interference they do in left wing movements where they spy and infiltrate spaces to disrupt and discredit vital activities aimed at e.g. preserving the environment. As a highlight, they tried to get MLK to kill himself. Much of this was documented by the revelations of COINTELPRO. That stuff was never punished, so why would they ever stop? It's good for the integrity of the state. For a conservative example, the recent "Obamagate" disclosures show how the FBI was instrumental in creating the now totally discredited Russiagate conspiracy which raged in the media for two years as a ploy to disrupt the Trump administration by an insane xenophobic conspiracy that Trump was the manchurian candidate, going so far as to create speculation that he was some kind of soviet sleeper agent from the 1980s. He's of course a bad guy, but this stuff is off the wall. Now the FBI is being brought under control by the current administration which is attempting to distract from it's total failure to respond to the pandemic and its actions which are widely acknowledged to have made it far worse that it should have been. The United States, the richest most powerful country in the world, has had one of the worst responses in the world. So the administration is attempting to clumsily pin the blame on a "foreign enemy" by saying it's attempting unfairly to do something about the pandemic. What an incredible world we live in. EDIT: To conclude: Is withholding medical information in a pandemic for any reason ethical? What about for making money? Is stealing such information from such an actor unethical?

narrator 6y ago

If the PRC gets a workable vaccine first, they can gain influence to get everyone to use a WHO run global vaccine passport instead of separate national systems. They can then tie the WHO's databank into their global surveillance system and franchise out China's surveillance state and social credit score system throughout the world.

caseysoftware 6y ago
Those are good points, I'd add two more: - "If you want to buy our vaccine, you need to buy Huawei equipment for all your communications systems" - we've already seen that in France with PPE - What would that do for investment in vaccine research if you know China can drop in theirs at any time and address the entire market? Investments dries up, China pulls back, go back to 1.

skrebbel 6y ago

I love the term "cyber actor". That's basically like Hugh Jackman and Jonny Lee Miller, right?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scollet 6y ago
And my favourite: Rami Malek

orbifold 6y ago

Just for additional context several super computing sites in Europe were attacked a few weeks ago and are still down, among them PizDaint at CSCS, which ranks 6th in the world, several super computing sites in Germany (FZ Juelich) and so on. I think no-one wishes this to turn into a kinetic war, but for all we know besides the economic warfare that has been going on for quite some time, this feels like we are in an all out conflict with China.

RobertoG 6y ago
we are in all out conflict with China because some super computing sites were "attacked"? That's not a very responsible statement.
- orbifold 6y ago
  Well this is clearly a hostile act during a time in which several European countries have declared medical emergencies. They were not just "attacked" but have been completely offline for almost two weeks now (https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/18/hacking-streak-forces-european-supercomputers-offline-in-midst-of-covid-19-research-effort/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/18/hacking-streak-forces-eur...). In Germany it is (incident was 15.05) - NEMO (Freiburg) - bwUniCluster 2.0 and ForHLR II (Karlsruhe) - Hawk (Stuttgart) - Leibniz Supercomputing Center (Munich) - JURECA, JUWELS und JUDAC (FZ Jülich) - Taurus (Dresden) Switzerland shutdown access to all of CSCS (16.05).
  - goodcjw2 6y ago
    Facts: 1 - HPC centers in Europes are down. 2 - Those are useful resources to battle battle against COVID-19. 3 - HPC centers are down due to malware infections. 4 - FBI warned and Department of Homeland Security warns of possible cyberattacks targeting COVID-19 research.
    - acqq 6y ago
      And in the linked article the probable cause is much more prosaic: "The attacks may have been perpetrated in order to mine cryptocurrency; investigations are ongoing."

smkellat 6y ago

If you’re doing research of any significance in today’s world and don’t have an active security program looking for harmful actions by foreign intelligence your organization opens itself up for all sorts of nasty liabilities. You don’t even have to have an electronic intrusion. The PRC’s government also pays people off as the case of this former Cleveland Clinic researcher shows: https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland-clinic-researcher-charged-with-fraud-for-failing-to-disclose-china-ties.html https://www.cleveland.com/crime/2020/05/former-cleveland-cli...

vsareto 6y ago
What kind of liabilities? That looks like a case against an individual. Are you talking human counter-intelligence as well as IT security?
- akiselev 6y ago
  Imagine a state actor hitting the contract research organization in charge of the last phase of a clinical trial for a blood pressure medication and changing data. Due to the nature of double blind trials, catching these modifications can become really hard to catch and could lead to a lot of human suffering.
  - La1n 6y ago
    If they target a CRO the sponsor still has the original data from the trial sites. I can say that at least for the company (one of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies) I work for this would almost be impossible to not be caught.
    - Icathian 6y ago
      Even the crappy little cowboy CRO I worked for had a fleet of CRA's go out and manually verify documents against the EDC. It's required by law. I think the FDA audit also repeats that process with a random sampling for some studies, though I couldn't swear to that. I get the point the parent comment was trying to make, but yeah, bad example.

troughway 6y ago

There is a big business opportunity, which I am sure is already fulfilled to some extent, to provide air-gap and other securities/countermeasures to businesses and orgs that deal with highly sensitive data, equipment, specimens, whatever. Something akin to an anti-Palantir.

tarkin2 6y ago

This press release encourages me to think China is covering up something. This /may/ be the case. But the FBI wants me to come to this conclusion. It seems a little fishy.

jhpriestley 6y ago

US Intelligence has released the following images of mobile bioweapons production labs, could they be in use by PRC to create Covid? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory#/media/File:Powell_UN_Iraq_presentation,_alleged_Mobile_Production_Facilities.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory#/med...

jorblumesea 6y ago

So the country that the virus originated from can't/doesn't even want to research vaccines properly? Or is this economic warfare to stop the West from producing a viable vaccine? Feels increasing likely that the real global virus here is the CCP.

horsemessiah 6y ago

How can western leaders condemn China's lack of publishing info related to COVID-19 and protect private research for curing it at the same time? Research like this should be public and accessible to everyone. I don't know why I shouldn't applaud any hackers spreading this information.

pedroma 6y ago
Companies will stop working on it the moment they lose incentive, etc etc.

dheera 6y ago

Given today's anti-free-thinker HN climate I'm probably going to get downvoted to oblivion for saying this, but I feel I need to say it. I don't think COVID-19 research should be secretive, I think it should be a global effort, and I'm perfectly happy with the idea of any nation having open access to all COVID-19 research, vaccines, results, and (anonymized) data. There should NOT be a concept of intellectual property when there are people dying in droves from a disease. Please, China, Italy, Spain, everywhere, scoop up all the COVID-19 research you can find and act upon it to save lives. Copy ideas. Copy drugs. Re-do and verify tests. Immediately. Don't mind the courts. They suck, and are sitting in armchairs killing people by delaying the effort and enforcing intellectual "property".

spacephysics 6y ago
Before sanctioning stealing, perhaps the problem is two fold. China wants to have the first vaccine for: * Becoming the first to market, to try and salvage their reputation * Using the vaccine as leverage toward the incoming sanctions for violating the Hong Kong treaty during UK handover, as well as the now-declared possible non-peaceful reunification of Taiwan * monetary gain * leverage against the US restricting/removing Chinese’s companies from the NASDAQ I agree research should be open, but it’s hard to say to what degree, and how that might effect the economics of it. Whether we like it or not, capitalistic driven progress requires a reward, and one of the few reasons pharmaceutical companies will take the risk of finding a vaccine is the potential for increased reputation, and being first to market. Without those incentives, it’s straightforward to not to take a massive monetary risk as others are all working on similar problems, thus the likelihood that your lab will be the first is slim. Further, the crisis is a worldwide pandemic, but if the rate of natural immunity is as high as some predict, the efficacy of these vaccines may lead to less ‘sales’ than initially expected. Oxford running out of people to test their vaccine on: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-25/COVID-19-disappearing-so-fast-vaccine-has-50-chance-of-working-QMLMMAUWJO/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-25/COVID-19-disappearing-... China report about Taiwan has “peaceful” removed: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-taiwan/china-drops-word-peaceful-in-latest-push-for-taiwan-reunification-idUSKBN22Y06S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-taiwan/c... China breaking the handover treaty: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/china-hong-kong-pandemic-autonomy-law-aggression/611983/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/05/ch...

unclebucknasty 6y ago

Yeah, but our kids can still all use TikTok, right? That's the important thing here.

NGRhodes 6y ago

Related: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomputer_cyberattack/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/uk_archer_supercomp... "One of Britain's most powerful academic supercomputers has fallen victim to a "security exploitation" of its login nodes, forcing the rewriting of all user passwords and SSH keys." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_research_hacking/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/05/coronavirus_researc... "Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) cautioned of a “password spraying” campaign targeting healthcare and medical research organisations."

dntbnmpls 6y ago
> Foreign state hackers are trying to brute-force their way into pharmaceutical and medical research agencies hunting for a COVID-19 vaccine, British and American infosec agencies are warning. I have a hard time believing foreign state hackers are using "script kiddie" tactics. But that's just me.

btrettel 6y ago

Some of the comments here discuss how an attacker could tamper with data. What are some good ways for a scientist to ensure the integrity of their data in this case? Post it online with a hash, particularly in a way that will get archived by others? Keep off-site backups?

g_p 6y ago
Where it's possible, perhaps using a deterministic process that can be easily repeated to verify the groupings haven't been tampered with? (Not to reduce the importance of backups, though they themselves can be attacked, but just as an idea for discussion...) Here's an idea for how this could work for an example given elsewhere in the thread about the risk of an attacker mislabelling the subjects so the outcomes are unclear or deliberately skewed. For a binary double-blind placebo trial (one group gets the medication, another gets the placebo), compute the hmac of each subject identifier (name, some participant ID), keyed with a key known to the principal investigator. Everyone whose hash MSB is above 0x80 gets the treatment, and everyone whose hash is below 0x80 gets the placebo. If you need more experimental groups, adjust the thresholds as needed Clearly this is very restrictive and limited (you might need to ensure a proper demographic and medical/age profile distribution of subjects between both groups), but there are likely ways to achieve this by creating multiple "groups" and doing this process within each demographic balanced group. You'd get a reproducible outcome, as long as you can recover the patient names or participant ID numbers, and the PI or experimental lead takes careful note of the hmac key used. Just a straw man idea for how at least the patient to group allocation could be done deterministically. If someone attacked this and muddled patients and groups around, it could be reproduced just from knowing who the subjects are, and the hmac key. Clearly this doesn't scale to results or beyond, but I imagine this is where digital signatures start to help. And with modern ed25519 signatures we aren't talking massive signatures either.

tehwebguy 6y ago

I mean, who cares? If they aren’t altering data let them read it. We are surely reading theirs too.

nineparts 6y ago
Why would we read it? It's just a copy of our data + some propaganda.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Have family that work in encryption, you can think of barriers to entry as orders of magnitude in cost. AWS can decipher decade old encryption standards for about $100k brute computational cost. Nation states have access to 5-8 zeros of effort if it is valuable enough. Private entities have no chance against nation-state backed hacking efforts. It’s one-sided or ‘asymmetric’, because western intelligence refuses to share commercial intelligence with western businesses (probably because there isn’t much of value to share... yet). Only solution is political change.

OBLIQUE_PILLAR 6y ago

COVID-19 affects the entire world. Shouldn't all COVID-19 basically be done on a globally viewable wiki? It's going to take the cooperation of all countries to get through it. I don't understand why the US should hoard any COVID-19 data it has, besides extremely non altruistic ones.

mc32 6y ago
Let’s see who else is putting valuable IP it out there.

737min 6y ago

Does anyone really wonder if we (the US) and China are going to be at war in the next 10 years?

nineparts 6y ago
I come from an ex-communist country. So this is probably (hopefully) the only moment my talent of spotting this kind of shit is useful. The thing is that whatever bad behavior the USA committed in the past, and then anxiously analyzed and mulled over for decades... the Chinese are doing day by day, routinely, without ANY remorse or second thought. With the Russians it was different. Sorry to say this, but compared to the Chinese, they had soul. I do not foresee anything like the collapse of the Soviet Union in China. They are too "rational" for it. Not to mention their numbers. Our only hope is Jesus Christ. US and China at war? I don't know. China at war? By their logic of expansion, I'm afraid it is guaranteed.
- yibg 6y ago
  Seems strange to me to assign any emotion to the political entity of a huge country. I don’t even mean what it means. What does China / America/ Soviet Union feeling remorse even look like? History has shown us that any super power will go to war. The Romans, the British, the Americans. Maybe we’ve learned our lesson from history or maybe today things are different due to greater education, multiculturalism and just rapid communication. Either way we shouldn’t be pinning our hopes on “Jesus Christ”, as again I don’t know what that means. Would he come down and disarm everyone or something? We avoid conflict by having rational open dialog, educating people and increasing transparency and accountability. The way to increase the probability of conflict is by having this tribalistic us vs them mentality. Everything they do is bad, they are evil and we are just.
  - nineparts 6y ago
    When that political party is set on dictating not only how every citizen but how every ethnic should behave... well...
- andarleen 6y ago

nineparts 6y ago

I know I might be the weirdo here for browsing 4chon, but for the last few months I have seen a huge incursion of "PRC-affiliated"... "contributions"... and not only to high traffic and high turnover boards but even to niche ones. On boards using flags, these "contributions" come mainly from Canada, USA, and France. Although I am secretly grateful for this spam, as it cut down my time spent there from 3-4 hours a week to 3-4 hours a month, it's still disconcerting as they are highly organized and apparently take huge pleasure in bludgeoning seals and other harmless creatures. Heck, I am amazed that the boards were clean even after the US Elections, the shutdown of 8chon and other such events.

asdkljas 6y ago

Reading through the comments, either muricans are so dumb. Or PRC/CCP has put their hands here. CCP are worse than the nazis, speaking as a Chinese.

737min 6y ago

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two-paths-global-domination-cold-war/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/22/china-superpower-two-pa...