Mar 30, 2021 12:57 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 30, 2021 01:01 AM by C C.)
Is Cyberwar War? (podcast)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/teleco...berwar-war
INTRO: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for Radio Spectrum.
At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.”
Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and government servers with distributed denial of service attacks; not just public websites but also what one report called “more vital targets, such as online banking and the Domain Name System,” without which people can’t find or look up websites and online servers.
The attack carried into the cyber realm an already heated political conflict between the two nations, and Estonia’s economy was as much under attack as its information infrastructure.
In 2009, China stole plans for an advanced U.S. fighter jet, and Chinese hackers have subsequently attacked Google, Intel, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street Journal, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
In 2010, we learned of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran and its uranium centrifuges, known as Stuxnet.
In 2015, a concerted attack, believed to have been Russian, on the power grid of another east European nation, Ukraine, left more than 200,000 people without electricity for at least several hours. It was the first attack on a grid, and perhaps the first large-scale SCADA attack—that is, on the control systems of critical infrastructure. Follow-up attacks struck the railway, television, and mining sectors.
In 2016, right around the time General Hayden was warning American audiences of the dangers of cyberwar, Russia, in conjunction with a private firm, Cambridge Analytica, and elements of the U.S. Republican party, crafted a disinformation campaign to influence the presidential election that year. Russia and Cambridge Analytica also undermined the Brexit referendum in the U.K. earlier that year.
Since then, we’ve seen entire families of malware appear, such as Trickbot. Arguably even worse was the recent SolarWinds hack, which in effect was an attack on what we might call the software supply chain. As many as 18 000 different organizations using SolarWinds may have been affected. Worse, the effects of the hack may have been reached out into other networks and therefore been exponential. For example, both Microsoft and security firm FireEye were affected, and they each have many enterprise customers.
That Fireeye itself could be vulnerable to attack in this way is stunning and humbling. As the fourth-century Roman poet Juvenal asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians themselves?
We’re lucky to have with us today Justin Cappos. He’s a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University and directs its Secure Systems Laboratory. He has a particular interest in building systems resilient to nation-state attacks and a particular interest in vulnerabilities in the software supply chain, especially in software updates. He joins us by Zoom.
Justin, welcome to the podcast... (MORE - the podcast)
Scandal over COVID vaccine trial at Peruvian universities prompts outrage
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...s-outrage/
EXCERPTS: A clinical trial of COVID-19 vaccines in Peru has sparked outrage and triggered a series of high-profile resignations at universities and in government. Politicians, researchers and some of their family members who were not enrolled as trial participants nevertheless received vaccines—breaching standard protocols. Investigations are ongoing as the country struggles to inoculate its general population with limited doses.
The scandal emerged on 10 February, when local media revealed that in October 2020, then-president Martín Vizcarra had received two doses of a vaccine developed by the Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm. At the time, a phase III clinical trial was under way to test the vaccine at two universities in Peru; Vizcarra was not part of the trial.
Days later, it emerged that a group of around 470 other people—including 100 high-profile individuals such as Peru’s minister of health and Vizcarra’s wife and brother—also got a jab while the trial was in progress. The shots came from a batch of about 2,000 doses that Peruvian officials reportedly negotiated with Sinopharm to protect the medical staff running the trial.
It is not standard practice to vaccinate anyone other than trial participants while a trial is under way—including the medical staff running it, says Euzebiusz Jamrozik, a bioethicist at the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford, UK.
The laws regulating clinical trials in Peru state that imported, experimental research products such as unapproved vaccines are to be used exclusively for research. One of the universities running the trial—the National University of San Marcos in Lima—issued a statement condemning the vaccinations of people not enrolled as participants...
[...] Málaga tells Nature: “We used as criteria the protection of ‘study personnel and related personnel’ in a broad way, and in that extension we included the network of infections of the people we wanted to protect.” He admits that this included members of his family but points out that it also covered medical staff who were working on the front line and thus, in his opinion, needed protection.
According to a press statement released by the INS, Málaga and his staff also administered three doses, rather than the prescribed two, to some individuals outside of the trial, to see whether an additional booster shot would improve protection against the coronavirus. In response to Nature’s queries about administering unauthorized doses, Málaga defended his choice. He pointed out that when he administered the shots last September and December, the Sinopharm vaccine had not yet been proved efficacious, and thus trying out extra doses on individuals wouldn’t have been taking them away from the public.
“Including an additional dose is a serious, arbitrary breach of protocol” and violates the “fundamental principles of medical ethics,” says Ignacio Maglio, coordinator of science ethics for the UNESCO Bioethics Network who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “It’s a clear example of malpractice in scientific study that could affect the safety of patients and puts at risk the dignity, the integrity and the safety of the research subjects.”
Failed transparency
Clarifying how and why vaccinations were administered outside the trial could help restore confidence in Peru’s science community, says Prochazka, but investigations are complicated by the fact that so many institutions are implicated.
The events in Peru aren’t the only instances in which members of the elite have jumped vaccine queues during the pandemic. In Argentina, for example, a similar list has emerged, resulting in the health minister’s resignation and a national investigation.
Arthur Caplan, head of New York University’s Division of Medical Ethics, says it makes sense to prioritize state leaders such as presidents and prime ministers for vaccines, but there has to be “a clear, principled approach to distribution”—and transparency. “The Peruvian case seems to be at the extreme of ethical outrage,” he says. “Vaccinations have to be built on trust, not who you know.” (MORE - details)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/teleco...berwar-war
INTRO: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for Radio Spectrum.
At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.”
Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and government servers with distributed denial of service attacks; not just public websites but also what one report called “more vital targets, such as online banking and the Domain Name System,” without which people can’t find or look up websites and online servers.
The attack carried into the cyber realm an already heated political conflict between the two nations, and Estonia’s economy was as much under attack as its information infrastructure.
In 2009, China stole plans for an advanced U.S. fighter jet, and Chinese hackers have subsequently attacked Google, Intel, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street Journal, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
In 2010, we learned of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran and its uranium centrifuges, known as Stuxnet.
In 2015, a concerted attack, believed to have been Russian, on the power grid of another east European nation, Ukraine, left more than 200,000 people without electricity for at least several hours. It was the first attack on a grid, and perhaps the first large-scale SCADA attack—that is, on the control systems of critical infrastructure. Follow-up attacks struck the railway, television, and mining sectors.
In 2016, right around the time General Hayden was warning American audiences of the dangers of cyberwar, Russia, in conjunction with a private firm, Cambridge Analytica, and elements of the U.S. Republican party, crafted a disinformation campaign to influence the presidential election that year. Russia and Cambridge Analytica also undermined the Brexit referendum in the U.K. earlier that year.
Since then, we’ve seen entire families of malware appear, such as Trickbot. Arguably even worse was the recent SolarWinds hack, which in effect was an attack on what we might call the software supply chain. As many as 18 000 different organizations using SolarWinds may have been affected. Worse, the effects of the hack may have been reached out into other networks and therefore been exponential. For example, both Microsoft and security firm FireEye were affected, and they each have many enterprise customers.
That Fireeye itself could be vulnerable to attack in this way is stunning and humbling. As the fourth-century Roman poet Juvenal asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians themselves?
We’re lucky to have with us today Justin Cappos. He’s a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at New York University and directs its Secure Systems Laboratory. He has a particular interest in building systems resilient to nation-state attacks and a particular interest in vulnerabilities in the software supply chain, especially in software updates. He joins us by Zoom.
Justin, welcome to the podcast... (MORE - the podcast)
Scandal over COVID vaccine trial at Peruvian universities prompts outrage
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...s-outrage/
EXCERPTS: A clinical trial of COVID-19 vaccines in Peru has sparked outrage and triggered a series of high-profile resignations at universities and in government. Politicians, researchers and some of their family members who were not enrolled as trial participants nevertheless received vaccines—breaching standard protocols. Investigations are ongoing as the country struggles to inoculate its general population with limited doses.
The scandal emerged on 10 February, when local media revealed that in October 2020, then-president Martín Vizcarra had received two doses of a vaccine developed by the Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm. At the time, a phase III clinical trial was under way to test the vaccine at two universities in Peru; Vizcarra was not part of the trial.
Days later, it emerged that a group of around 470 other people—including 100 high-profile individuals such as Peru’s minister of health and Vizcarra’s wife and brother—also got a jab while the trial was in progress. The shots came from a batch of about 2,000 doses that Peruvian officials reportedly negotiated with Sinopharm to protect the medical staff running the trial.
It is not standard practice to vaccinate anyone other than trial participants while a trial is under way—including the medical staff running it, says Euzebiusz Jamrozik, a bioethicist at the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford, UK.
The laws regulating clinical trials in Peru state that imported, experimental research products such as unapproved vaccines are to be used exclusively for research. One of the universities running the trial—the National University of San Marcos in Lima—issued a statement condemning the vaccinations of people not enrolled as participants...
[...] Málaga tells Nature: “We used as criteria the protection of ‘study personnel and related personnel’ in a broad way, and in that extension we included the network of infections of the people we wanted to protect.” He admits that this included members of his family but points out that it also covered medical staff who were working on the front line and thus, in his opinion, needed protection.
According to a press statement released by the INS, Málaga and his staff also administered three doses, rather than the prescribed two, to some individuals outside of the trial, to see whether an additional booster shot would improve protection against the coronavirus. In response to Nature’s queries about administering unauthorized doses, Málaga defended his choice. He pointed out that when he administered the shots last September and December, the Sinopharm vaccine had not yet been proved efficacious, and thus trying out extra doses on individuals wouldn’t have been taking them away from the public.
“Including an additional dose is a serious, arbitrary breach of protocol” and violates the “fundamental principles of medical ethics,” says Ignacio Maglio, coordinator of science ethics for the UNESCO Bioethics Network who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “It’s a clear example of malpractice in scientific study that could affect the safety of patients and puts at risk the dignity, the integrity and the safety of the research subjects.”
Failed transparency
Clarifying how and why vaccinations were administered outside the trial could help restore confidence in Peru’s science community, says Prochazka, but investigations are complicated by the fact that so many institutions are implicated.
The events in Peru aren’t the only instances in which members of the elite have jumped vaccine queues during the pandemic. In Argentina, for example, a similar list has emerged, resulting in the health minister’s resignation and a national investigation.
Arthur Caplan, head of New York University’s Division of Medical Ethics, says it makes sense to prioritize state leaders such as presidents and prime ministers for vaccines, but there has to be “a clear, principled approach to distribution”—and transparency. “The Peruvian case seems to be at the extreme of ethical outrage,” he says. “Vaccinations have to be built on trust, not who you know.” (MORE - details)