GCHQ Director Jeremy Fleming said the hackers were targeting the UK\u2019s health infrastructure and research labs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do know that, whether it\u2019s states or criminals, they are going after things which are sensitive to us,\u201d Fleming said. \u201cSo it\u2019s a high priority for us to protect the health sector, particularly the race to acquire a vaccine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The heads of GCHQ, the UK\u2019s signal intelligence agency, rarely give interviews. This one was given to the Cheltenham Science Festival.<\/p>\n
The hackers were \u201clooking for pretty basic vulnerabilities,\u201d including \u201clures to get people to click on the wrong thing…where people aren\u2019t backing up properly, or where they\u2019ve got basic passwords and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Fleming did not mention China by name, the Guardian reported that sources said China was often involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the UK, we see China as an intelligence adversary. We see them as an economic partner. We work with them in some areas, we compete with them in others, and in still others, we call out their behaviors when we don\u2019t think they align with what we expect to see or with our values,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A former head of the UK\u2019s foreign intelligence agency MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, said yesterday he believed the coronavirus was manmade and escaped from a Chinese lab by accident.<\/p>\n
Dearlove ran the agency in the run-up to the Iraq War, between 1999 and 2004.<\/p>\n
He told the Daily Telegraph that he had seen \u201cvery important\u201d research where scientists claimed to have identified \u201cinserted sections placed on the Sars-CoV-2 Spike surface\u201d that binds to human cells and were \u201csignificantly different from any Sars we have studied.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not think that this started as an accident,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt raises the issue, if China ever were to admit responsibility, does it pay reparations? I think it will make every country in the world rethink how it treats its relationship with China and how the international community behaves towards the Chinese leadership,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The research in question has been widely dismissed by both scientists and security officials alike and was by Professor Angus Dalgleish, who works at St George\u2019s Hospital at the University of London and is a former candidate for UKIP, a right-wing British party.<\/p>\n
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has previously said the government had seen \u201cno evidence\u201d to suggest the virus had started in a lab.<\/p>\n
The theory is popular with US President Donald Trump, however.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The head of Britain\u2019s spy agency GCHQ said Thursday that hackers from hostile states were trying to steal secret coronavirus vaccine research. GCHQ Director Jeremy Fleming said the hackers were targeting the UK\u2019s health infrastructure and research labs. \u201cWe do know that, whether it\u2019s states or criminals, they are going after things which are sensitive …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":66018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[75410,2381,77263],"class_list":["post-66017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","tag-british-gchq","tag-china","tag-donald-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}