Nearly 25,000 email addresses and their passwords belonging to the National Institute of Health (NIH), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Gates Foundation among other groups fighting the COVID-19 pandemic have been hacked.
The data dump also appears to carry email addresses and passwords for a virology centre based in Wuhan, which has given rise to a lot of conspiracy theories.
According to a report in The Washington Post, unknown activists posted 25,000 email addresses and passwords online. This was brought to light by SITE Intelligence Group, a body that monitors online extremism and terrorist groups. Robert Potter, an independent Australian cybersecurity expert, said the data was real as he could verify some of the email IDs and passwords of WHO.
However, he points out it could be from an earlier attack as cybersecurity tends to be quite low at healthcare organisations.
The list of IDs and passwords appeared on a message board called 4chan and later on another text storage site called Pastebin. They were even forwarded to groups on Telegram.
While what appears to have been posted in forums is only the emails and passwords, there are conspiracy theories floating that COVID-19 is a more sinister plot, but there is no proof about that.
The report by SITE based in Maryland, US, says the largest group of leaked email addresses was from the NIH, with 9,938 IDs leaked. The World Bank had 5,120 IDs leaked and WHO had 2,732 IDs leaked.
Email IDs were also found for the Gates Foundation, which recently announced a $150 million funding to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research lab in Wuhan, which was the epicentre of the pandemic.
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