Ex-IDF Intelligence official: Russian cyber, disinformation trends converge with vaccine

Russian President Vladimir Putin is interested in depicting his country as winning the vaccine race.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Scientists develop a vaccine against the coronavirus disease in Saint Petersburg (photo credit: REUTERS)
Scientists develop a vaccine against the coronavirus disease in Saint Petersburg
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Russia is using cyber and disinformation to bolster its standing regarding everything surrounding the issue of a coronavirus vaccine, former IDF Intelligence officer Lt.-Col. (ret.) Daniel Rakov said at a recent cyber and intelligence conference.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is interested in depicting his country as winning the vaccine race and is using hacking and social-media campaigns to discredit competing vaccines, he said during the video conference organized by the Israeli Intelligence and Heritage Commemoration Center (IICC).
Russia is hacking vaccine research from the US, Canada and England while acting as if it is ahead, said Rakov, who is an Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) fellow. All three countries have accused Moscow of hacking.
“Russia does not view cyber as a sphere that stands on its own, but rather as a part of the information realm” where it is operating to achieve broader aims, he said.
Moscow’s declaration that it was the first to produce a vaccine was “an attempt to present itself as the victor in the vaccine race,” Rakov said. “There is significant criticism worldwide regarding the registration of the vaccine, which it appears does not meet the accepted standards.”
Part of Russia’s need to present itself as the vaccine victor is actually to cover up that it is “viewed as lacking technologically domestically and globally” in this arena, he said.
Regarding the hacking, Putin was not after vaccine research to move his scientists along, but rather after embarrassing information about competing vaccines, Rakov said.
The idea was to roll out information about other countries’ vaccines violating their own standards and failures in early trials to discredit them during periods where those states would be presenting their vaccines as more reliable than Moscow’s rushed solution, he said.
Russia’s hacking was likely “an attempt to obtain information about insufficiencies in other vaccines in order to weaken their credibility for when there is a competition,” Rakov said. “It seems only information about failures was stolen, and they did not actively undermine” development of competing vaccines.
Regarding a broader topic at the IICC conference, IICC research chairman and former IDF Intelligence research director Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Yossi Kuperwasser said: “There are constant cyber attacks, but the corona period has highlighted the danger of cyber attacks, especially in the health arena.”
“Israel, among others, is a target for [those who wish to] steal sensitive data, such as regarding the vaccine” for coronavirus, he said.
Kuperwasser emphasized the need to think creatively in combining intelligence strategy and tactics for achieving a balanced cyber defense.
Former IDF Intelligence Col. (ret.) Shay Shabtai, who currently works at Konfidas, said a crucial cutting-edge issue in cyber is fully mapping out and plugging holes where hacks took place.
In some cases, a government or organization might view “an incident as having finished, but the organization might now know everything that was leaked,” and there could be ongoing damage until they tie up those loose ends, he said.
Israel CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) cyber director Lavi Shtokheimer said: “The physical and cyber world are becoming more and more the same, and the logic of how they operate is becoming close to identical.”
Just like countries need to know hospitals will not collapse under the weight of the coronavirus outbreak, nations and organizations must have the security that their networks will not collapse from cyber-style outbreaks, he said.
Fireye Israel chief cyber analyst Sanaz Yashar, a former IDF Unit 8200 veteran, said the most important change decision-makers needed to make was conceptual.
If cyber was already emerging as its own threat area pre-coronavirus, it now stretches into whole new universes and exposes countries to far more vulnerabilities in an age where social distancing has forced massive amounts of human interactions online, he said.
Many countries are now tracking their citizens in ways that never would have been imagined, and while ostensibly this is to combat coronavirus, this data can be abused and hacked in many ways, Yashar said.
Though China is often described in the West as a technology hacker and thief, there have been attempts to hack China’s probe of how coronavirus broke out within its borders, he said.
There have been accusations that China is withholding or slow-walking information about the COVID-19’s origins, which could help in combating it.
Multiple presenters discussed handling cyber attacks using medical metaphors, such as starting with providing first aid, but then moving on to a more full diagnosis and introducing preventative tests and treatments.
Ohad Seidenberg, founder of CTI League and a cyber analyst at Clearsky Cyber Security, discussed the importance of voluntary industry associations for sharing cyber problems and solutions. IICC deputy head of research Lt.-Col. (ret.) David Siman-Tov moderated the session.