UK and US say China and others are carrying out cyber attacks to prevent vaccine production

We don’t know who is behind the reported malicious cyber attacks on US – and UK – “Covid-19 (vaccine) labs” – and due to how cyberattacks are carried out, as any cybersecurity expert worth their salt will tell you – even if these attacks have occurred, we will never actually know who carried them out.

But that should not stop us from naming those unknown attackers – not if we’re Sky News. Let’s say it’s more than half the world: China, Russia, and Iran. It’s a vague and nebulous enough accusation trying to tie in too many diverse actors to actually mean anything. And highly likely, none of these countries will bother suing Sky News.

So here’s how the story flows. According to the report, labs are working overtime all over the world to come up with a vaccine against coronavirus and its disease, Covid-19.

(Coronavirus – official name SARS-CoV-2 – in case you forgot, is a new iteration of SARS, in many ways a much nastier, though not as contagious strain of the same virus that has been without a vaccine for nearly two decades now – presumably because it’s hard to come up with one?)

But the way Sky News frames it, the race to create a vaccine quickly and save the world is being thwarted by a gallery of nasty characters: China, Russia, Iran, and delightfully, an unspecified quantity and quality of something called “others.”

(Who are they? Your readers want to know.)

Anyway, this is not merely some poor excuse for journalism imitating a Bond movie script – it’s a report quoting an official statement.

It was UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab who revealed there were “particularly venal and nefarious” attempts by bad actors to derail attempts to fast-track that SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.

“There are various objectives and motivations that lie behind these attacks, from fraud on the one hand to espionage,” Raab said.

The last time we heard from UK’s National Cyber Security Center, a branch of GCHQ, they were politically correcting technical documentation in order to eradicate racism.

Now we hear they are among those who put together this joint advisory published on Tuesday.

The advisory is urging healthcare and medical research workers “to change easy-to-guess passwords.” Hardly sounds like a complex cyber attack.