COVID-ski spy attack

Russian hackers bid to steal labs’ vaccine

LONDON: Britain, the US and Canada have accused Russianbacked hackers of spying on labs in their countries in a bid to steal their research into a vaccine for the coronavirus.

The three governments pointed the finger at the Kremlin, saying a hacking group called APT29 was “almost certainly” linked to Russian intelligence.

As relations between the West and Moscow continue to deteriorate, London also accused “Russian actors” of trying to disrupt last year’s British general election by circulating leaked trade documents between Britain and the US.

Both accusations came even before the publication in the coming days of a longawaited Westminster report into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit vote.

Russia quickly rejected the accusations as “groundless”.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment said APT29 was “a cyber espionage group” that was “almost certainly part of the Russian intelligence services”. They said their assessment was endorsed by the US.

“Throughout 2020, APT29 has targeted various organisations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development in Canada, the US and the UK, highly likely with the intention of stealing information and intellectual property relating to the development and testing of vaccines,” they said.

In a separate statement, the US National Security Agency repeated the accusations and said APT29 “uses a variety of tools and techniques to predominantly target governmental, diplomatic, thinktank, healthcare and energy targets for intelligence gain”.

Russia and Britain have been at loggerheads ever since Moscow was accused of trying to kill double agent Sergei Skripal with a military-grade nerve agent in 2018. The attack in Salisbury, southwest England, came 12 years after the radiation poisoning of former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London. Again, Russia denied involvement.

Britain is one of several countries conducting human vaccine trials for COVID-19. One, at the University of Oxford, has shown potentially positive results, media reports said on Friday.

The National Cyber Security Centre, part of Britain’s GCHQ electronic eavesdropping agency, said the Oxford University labs were among those targeted “to steal valuable intellectual property”.

The government said there were strong suspicions of a Russian link to the leak of classified documents about a post-Brexit trade deal with the US. An inquiry was launched after files were published online.