Risking the diplomatic ties with Russia, the United States, Britain and Canada are accusing Russian spies of mingling with the coronavirus vaccine makers. The group of these hackers is known as APT29, which is certainly linked to the Russian Intelligence.
To support the claims, London brought up the last year general election issue where Russian spies tried to sabotage the election. They allegedly leaked the confidential trade documents between Britain and the United States.
After various unacceptable dialogues between Britain and Russia like the killing of Sergei Skripal and attack in Salisbury, southwest England both countries has strong reasons.
Being one of the world’s first country to conduct human trials of the vaccine, security company of Britain (National Cyber Security Centre, NCSC), Canada (Canadian Communication Security Establishment, CSE) and United States (United States Department for Homeland Security, DHS) and Cyber-security Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has given them a warning and asked to remain cautious.
Blaming hackers blankly was common among western intelligence agencies but, this time security is targeting Russian hackers of hijacking their highly sensitive vaccine research.
Agencies have come up with proofs of malicious software used to penetrate the computer systems. In addition to that, vulnerable individuals were also manipulated into giving confidential login credentials using phishing techniques.
In response to all these allegations, Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson of President Putin broke his silence on the matter and said that “We do not have information about who may have hacked into pharmaceutical companies and research centres in Great Britain. We can say one thing – Russia has nothing at all to do with these attempts.”
Multiple differing opinions came forward on this matter as a Cambridge University professor, Ross Anderson mentioned that Russians can not be the only ones involved in this suspicious act. “Americans has a lot of people and so do Chinese,” he commented.
Other experts support the cyber-attack allegations on Russians as, despite their constant denial in Kremlin, their involvement was discovered later.
An assistant US attorney general mentioned that hackers are trying to attack vaccine researches because the first country to invent a vaccine successfully will gain numerous benefits on a global scale.
