US Intelligence Agencies Hacked Cloud Servers Containing Wuhan Lab Virus Samples - Report

By Staff, Agencies

US intelligence agencies have gotten their hands on genetic blueprint data from virus samples being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and are studying the information to see if it can help uncover Covid’s origins, CNN reported, citing multiple people said to be familiar with the investigation.

The CNN was not told how agencies supposedly got hold of the sensitive information, but its sources said it may have been hacked from computers connected to external cloud-based servers which were involved in creating and processing the data.

US spooks are said to have tapped into the Department of Energy’s National Labs and their supercomputers to help process the information in accordance with President Biden’s request in May that intelligence put a report on his desk about coronavirus’s possible origins by the end of August. Biden made the request after his administration walked back on its earlier assumptions that the virus appeared to be of natural origins [a position long-supported by China and the WHO].

Intelligence agencies have reportedly faced several problems in interpreting the information, including the need to recruit government scientists with the appropriate security clearances and knowledge of Mandarin.

“Obviously there are scientists who are cleared. But Mandarin-speaking ones who are cleared? That’s a very small pool. And not just any scientists, but ones who specialize in bio? So you can see how this quickly becomes difficult,” one source, who was not authorized to provide his or her identity, said.

After the coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic in 2020, the US accused China of scrubbing genetic data from the estimated 22,000 virus samples being studied at the Wuhan lab from the internet, and charged Beijing with refusing to hand the information to the US side or the WHO.

However, reporting by the Wall Street Journal from earlier this summer found that the US’s own National Institutes of Health mysteriously scrubbed over a dozen gene sequences from its databases in June of 2020, supposedly at the request from a Chinese researcher.