Whitney Webb | Unlimited Hangout (August 2020)
Anonymous “volunteers” from an opaque group founded by a former
commander of Israel’s Unit 8200 have been granted access to some of the
most critical private and public networks in the US’ healthcare and
pharmaceutical sectors, with the help of a US federal agency now run by a
former Microsoft executive.
Since the Coronavirus crisis began in earnest earlier this year, the
strain on hospitals in the US and around the world has been the subject
of a considerable number of media reports. However, hardly any media
attention has been given to the dramatic and unsettling changes that
have been made to hospital and healthcare information technology (IT)
systems and infrastructure under the guise of helping the US healthcare system “cope” with the surge in data as well as an unsettling uptick in cyberattacks.
Over the past several months, 80% of healthcare institutions in the
US have reported being targeted by some sort of cyberattack, ranging
from minor to severe, with an uptick in phishing attempts and spam specifically. Most of these attempts have been aimed at illegally acquiring troves of patient data, including the recent hacks of hospitals in Chicagoand Utah. About 20% of the hacks and cyberattacks reported by hospitals and medical facilities since March directly affected the facilities’ capacity to function optimally, with a much smaller percentage of those including ransomware attacks.
One of the reasons for the increase in the success of these attacks
has been the fact that more healthcare IT workers are working remotely
as well as the fact that many IT staffers have been laid off or let go
completely. In several recent instances, the removal of entire hospital
system IT staffs have been tied to a larger effort by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to consolidate control over patient data, including Coronavirus-related data, with the assistance of secretive government contractors with longstanding ties to HHS.
The surge of cyberattacks combined with major budget cuts has
made hospitals even more vulnerable as many are compelled to do more
with less. As a result, there has been a renewed push for the
improvement of cybersecurity at hospitals, clinics and other healthcare
institutions throughout the country over the course of the Coronavirus
(Covid-19) crisis.
Amid this backdrop, an odd group of “cyber threat intelligence”
analysts with ties to the US government, Israeli intelligence and tech
giant Microsoft have “volunteered” to protect US healthcare institutions
for free and have even directly partnered with US federal agencies to
do so. They have also recently expanded to offer their services to
governments and social media platforms to target, analyze and
“neutralize” alleged “disinformation campaigns” related to the
Coronavirus crisis.
While these analysts have claimed to have altruistic motives, its
members who have identified themselves publicly have notably dedicated
much of their private sector careers to blaming nation states, namely
Iran but also China, for hacking and, most recently, for cyberattacks
related to the Coronavirus crisis, as well as the 2020 presidential
campaign. These individuals and their employers rarely, if ever, make
their reasons for assigning blame to state actors available to public
scrutiny and also have close ties to the very governments, namely the US
and Israel, that have been attempting to gin up hostilities with those
countries in recent years, particularly Iran, suggesting a potential
conflict of interest.
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