Analysis & Opinions - Foreign Policy

How Hackers and Spies Could Sabotage the Coronavirus Fight

| Feb. 28, 2020

Intelligence services have a long history of manipulating information on health issues, and an epidemic is especially tempting for interference. Why aren’t we better prepared?

The world is racing to contain the new coronavirus that is spreading around the globe with alarming speed. Right now, pandemic disease experts at the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other public-health agencies are gathering information to learn how and where the virus is spreading. To do so, they are using a variety of digital communications and surveillance systems. Like much of the medical infrastructure, these systems are highly vulnerable to hacking and interference.

That vulnerability should be deeply concerning. Governments and intelligence agencies have long had an interest in manipulating health information, both in their own countries and abroad. They might do so to prevent mass panic, avert damage to their economies, or avoid public discontent (if officials made grave mistakes in containing an outbreak, for example). Outside their borders, states might use disinformation to undermine their adversaries or disrupt an alliance between other nations. A sudden epidemic—when countries struggle to manage not just the outbreak but its social, economic and political fallout—is especially tempting for interference.

In the case of coronavirus, such interference is already well underway. That fact should not come as a surprise. States hostile to the West have a long track record of manipulating information about health issues to sow distrust. In the 1980s, for example, the Soviet Union spread the false story that the U.S. Department of Defense bioengineered HIV in order to kill African Americans. This propaganda was effective: Some 20 years after the original Soviet disinformation campaign, a 2005 survey found that 48 percent of African Americans believed HIV was concocted in a laboratory, and 15 percent thought it was a tool of genocide aimed at their communities.

More recently, in 2018, Russia undertook an extensive disinformation campaign to amplify the anti-vaccination movement using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook....

For more information on this publication: Belfer Communications Office
For Academic Citation: Schneier, Bruce and Margaret Bourdeaux.“How Hackers and Spies Could Sabotage the Coronavirus Fight.” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2020.

The Authors