Beijing is very likely trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research from the United States, according to the head of the Justice Department’s China Initiative.
Jonathan Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, issued stark warnings about China’s long history of economic espionage and cyberattacks during a lengthy online discussion with Strategic News Service’s “FireSide Future In Review” this week, calling it “beyond absurd” for anyone to think that the Chinese Communist Party’s operations would stop during a global pandemic.
Near the end of the discussion, after he laid out in detail Beijing’s recent history as the world’s top thief of trade secrets, noting that 80% of the Justice Department’s economic espionage cases since the passage of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 involve China, the top DOJ official was pressed on whether China is currently targeting U.S. hospitals and research labs to steal information that doctors and scientists are learning about the coronavirus.
“It’s certainly the logical conclusion of everything I’ve said — there is nothing more valuable today than biomedical research relating to vaccines or treatments for the coronavirus,” Demers said. “And it would be beyond absurd to think that, ‘Well, the Chinese, they care about all this other stuff, but this they’re gonna lay off.’ Because it is of great importance not just from a commercial value, but whatever country’s company or research lab develops that vaccine first and is able to produce it is going to have a significant geopolitical success story.”
In consideration of the threat of China trying to steal coronavirus research, he added, “We are very attuned to increased cyberintrusions into medical centers, research centers, universities — anybody that is doing research in this area, yes.”
The DOJ’s China Initiative, launched in 2018, aims to combat both Chinese malign influence (ranging from cyberespionage to technology theft) and its Thousand Talents Program, which is aimed at stealing research. The department charged Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in a global racketeering scheme earlier this year.
“The scope of the problem is quite large — it’s in any industry that has a technology that is of interest to the Chinese,” Demers said. “So, this isn’t the traditional anymore sort of Russian approach to stealing military technologies or dual-use technologies. It’s really the theft of intellectual property for economic development, where the line between military and commercial is not particularly relevant for these purposes.”
Over the weekend, CNN cited U.S. government officials who said the Health and Human Services Department, along with hospitals, research labs, healthcare providers, and pharmaceutical companies, have all been hit with daily cyberattacks.
“It is safe to say that there are only two places in the world” — China and Russia — “that could hit (the Department of Health and Human Services) the way it’s been hit,” an official said. CNN further reported that “after some hesitance to attribute the wide-ranging attacks across the medical sector to any specific countries … top national security officials have decided to single out China,” one official said in the report.
The comments by Demers illuminate warnings by FBI Deputy Assistant Director Tonya Ugoretz this month when she confirmed both cybercriminals and foreign government hackers had targeted the U.S. in a variety of ways, including attempts to steal information related to the U.S. response to COVID-19 and related research. Ugoretz did not reveal which countries were going after U.S. research at the time.
“When we’re talking about threat actors, we’re talking about cybercriminals, those who are looking to conduct cyberintrusions, theft of information, a variety of cybercrimes, usually for personal profit,” she said. “Countries have a very high desire for information … about how other countries are responding but also about things like research on vaccines and what’s happening in the U.S. healthcare sector and our research institutes. So, we have certainly seen reconnaissance activity and some intrusions into some of those institutions, especially those that have publicly identified themselves as working on COVID-related research.”
Ugoretz said the “sad flip side” of U.S. research companies being open about the work they are carrying out “is that it kind of makes them a mark for other nation-states that are interested in gleaning details about what exactly they’re doing and maybe even stealing proprietary information that those institutions have.”
Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that medical research organizations and their employees should be “vigilant” against stolen intellectual property or other sensitive data related to the coronavirus outbreak.
“Now is the time to protect the critical research you’re conducting,” Evanina said earlier this month. “Don’t wait until your research is stolen and being manufactured overseas.”
Demers’s warnings were made more explicit by Sen. Tom Cotton on Sunday. “I have little doubt that the Chinese intelligence services are actively trying to steal America’s intellectual property as it relates to the virus that they unleashed on the world,” the Arkansas Republican told Fox News.
“In the middle of a pandemic, what’s the most valuable intellectual property in the world? It’s the research that our great laboratories and life science companies are doing on prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs, and ultimately a vaccine,” the senator added. “They [China] want to be the country that claims credit for finding those drugs or finding a vaccine and then use it as leverage against the rest of the world.”
Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion article this weekend noting that “the first nation to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 could have an economic advantage as well as a tremendous public-health achievement … and will be first to restore its economy and global influence.” He said that “America risks being second” and warned that “the U.S. can’t rely on vaccines from China … being available in America quickly.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned about Chinese hacking on Thursday, telling Fox News, “The biggest threat isn’t our ability to work with China on cyber — it’s to make sure that we have the resources available to protect ourselves from Chinese cyberattacks.”
Politico reported an unclassified bulletin from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency stating that since the beginning of February, 38 different U.S. contractor facilities that deal with classified information had likely been hit by a Chinese government-linked hacking group dubbed Electric Panda.
In March, Attorney General William Barr vowed there would be “severe” consequences if a foreign country was behind the denial-of-service cyberattacks against the HHS website. The attorney general also warned this month that “the Chinese are engaged in a full-court blitzkrieg of stealing American technology, trying to influence our political system, trying to steal secrets at our research universities and so forth — and we are focused on it.”
Both the Education Department and DOJ prosecutors have gone after universities for concealing their foreign funding, including a high-profile arrest in January of a Harvard professor tied to China’s Wuhan University of Technology.
The Justice Department has increased its scrutiny of China’s activities in recent years, charging an increased number of espionage cases, cracking down on China-based hacking schemes, and prosecuting efforts to steal trade secrets.
