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A comment on The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-affiliated cyber actors”. Parent comment

Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by Reelin on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @03:21PM (#23315369)
> this is clearly a hostile act

That's not my reading of the article you linked. A bad actor compromised the credentials of multiple researchers with access to various supercomputers (over some unknown or at least unspecified period of time). They then simultaneously accessed the compromised machines and installed cryptocurrency mining software on them.

This could easily be profit motivated (as it appears). It could also be (as you suggest) a hostile act disguised as the former, but I don't see what the motivation to do that would be?

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Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by fpgaminer on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @03:46PM (#23315618)
Also the article mentions that Chinese researchers had access to the clusters as well. So the GP's implication is that the PRC attacked these datacenters ... to stop their own research?

Seems more likely that more people are using/accessing these services, and people's guards are down, which made it easier for intruders to get in.

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Re:The FBI investigating hacking of Covid research by “PRC-a... by orbifold on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @03:47PM (#23315628)
Well there were two incidents (https://csirt.egi.eu/academic-data-centers-abused-for-crypto...) one of which had "unknown purpose". It had the real effect of disrupting the majority of the super computing infrastructure in Switzerland and Germany for almost two weeks now. The attacks originated from China (Shanghai Jiao Tong University and CSTNET).
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