Chinese hackers target Indian vaccine makers SII, Bharat Biotech, says security firm

• A Chinese state-backed hacking group has in recent weeks targeted the IT systems of two Indian vaccine makers whose coronavirus shots are being used in the country’s immunization campaign, cyber intelligence firm Cyfirma told Reuters.
• Rivals China and India have both sold or gifted COVID-19 shots to many countries. India produces more than 60% of all vaccines sold in the world.
• Goldman Sachs-backed Cyfirma, based in Singapore and Tokyo, said Chinese hacking group APT10, also known as Stone Panda, had identified gaps and vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure and supply chain software of Bharat Biotech and the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker.
• “The real motivation here is actually exfiltrating intellectual property and getting competitive advantage over Indian pharmaceutical companies,” said Cyfirma Chief Executive Kumar Ritesh, formerly a top cyber official with British foreign intelligence agency MI6.
• SII and Bharat Biotech declined to comment.
• The office of the director-general of the state-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) said the matter had been handed to its operations director, S.S. Sarma.
• Sarma told Reuters CERT was a “legal agency and we can’t confirm this thing to media”.
• Cyfirma said in a statement it had informed CERT authorities and that they had acknowledged the threat.
• “They checked and they came back,” Cyfirma said. “Our technical analysis and evaluation verified the threats and attacks.”
• Ritesh, whose firm follows the activities of some 750 cyber criminals and monitors nearly 2,000 hacking campaigns using a tool called DeCYFIR, said it was not yet clear what vaccine-related information APT10 may have accessed from the Indian companies.
• Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN shot, developed with the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research, will be exported to many countries, including Brazil.
• S. drug maker Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech SE said in Dec that documents related to development of their COVID-19 vaccine had been “unlawfully accessed” in a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator.
• China is yet to specifically deny the cyberattack on India’s power grid that a US firm said led to a Mumbai blackout. A defensive China claims it’s “very difficult to trace the origin of a cyberattack.” India admits “state-sponsored” Chinese hackers repeatedly target its plants.
• As its security agencies forewarned, India’s reliance on Chinese power and telecom equipment has turned into a major security risk.

China marches on to militarism and totalitarianism ANI

• There is growing alarm at the inexorable rise of China, both of its military prowess and its aggressive bullying of other countries plus its subjugation of whole portions of its own population.
• Under Chairman Xi Jinping, China has accelerated its militarization, with constant remonstrations for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to modernize and to boost its loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
• Ominously, Xi spends a lot of time telling the populace to prepare for an all-out “struggle”.
• At the same time, Xi has stamped his authority on every single aspect of Chinese society so as to control the thinking and behavior of his 1.4 billion subjects.
• There is growing fear among China’s neighbors, and Western countries like USA that China will stoke a war.
• For now, the PLA is using “gray zone” tactics, behavior short of armed struggle but which is nonetheless coercive and bullying, to gain control of areas like the South China Sea.
• One American think-tank that has been particularly vocal about the China threat, especially to Taiwan, is the Project 2049 Institute based in Virginia.
• This organization held a webinar on 25 Feb entitled “The 5-Year Scan: Assessing PLA Reforms, Readiness and Potential Indo-Pacific Contingencies“.
• The Project 2049 Institute’s guest speaker was Chad Sbragia, who until recently was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
• He described the threat, saying, “More simply, the PLA isn’t preparing to fight today’s war better; they’re really preparing to prevail in future wars, wars that no country has fought or that has emerged yet in full form.“
• “The heart of the PLA’s view of future warfighting was summed up nicely this week in yet another PLA article on future war design.
• To paraphrase the author, future war design is a pre-war craft that combines military science with what they refer to as futurology, in what the author describes as the grand chess game of world military competition.
• In order to seek the initiative in future wars, it is necessary to foresee and to scientifically design wars as soon as possible and to strive to find insights for future wars.”
• Indeed, the PLA believes that the form of war and its winning mechanism has changed, with constant talk about mechanized, intelligentized and informationized warfare.