The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has disrupted the activities of a China-based hacking group that we call Nickelthat was being using to attack organizations in the United States and 28 other countries around the world.
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After another Nobelium cyberattack, Microsoft has emphasized the need to differentiate between "espionage as usual" acts and crippling attacks like SolarWinds. It has encouraged cloud adoption too.
COVID-19 Vaccine and Cyber espionage
News Highlights: COVID-19 Vaccine and Cyber espionage.
Less than a year after the first Covid-19 death was reported from China, the first clinically approved vaccine was administered by Pfizer-BioNtech to Margaret Keenan in the United Kingdom (UK) on December 8, 2020. The Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine, a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine, is the fastest vaccine ever developed.
Subsequently, a handful of other vaccines have also been marketed, including by Oxford-AstraZeneca in the UK, Moderna in the US, Sinovac and Sinopharm in China, Bharat Biotech in India and Sputnik V and Epivaccorona in Russia.
While the world is celebrating the success of the rollout of these vaccines, some companies involved in vaccine development and distribution have faced disruptions due to cyber threats.
The pandemic deepened dependence on digital technologies and expanded opportunities for cybercrime and cyber espionage. Public health measures, such as lockdowns, produced a surge in online activities. The ability of tech companies and the internet to handle the demand underscored the remarkable capabilities that cyberspace provides. However, this crisis-induced dependence created an even more fertile field for cybercrime and cyber espionage, which, even before the pandemic, constituted serious threats. Pandemic-related incidents, such as criminal ransomware attacks on health facilities and cyber espionage against vaccine research-and-development efforts, garnered the most attention, but the online surge increased the incentives for criminals and intelligence agencies to exploit cyber vulnerabilities in all sectors of economic and political activity.