An attack on a virology or vaccine lab? --- Scott, I must admit I had similar thoughts/worries when COVID broke through. Virology research labs are also digitalised - imagine an attack which would tweak some research data and remove the alert about how viral or dangerous a studied sample is?

Or: as our vaccines are produced through a digitalised process (a machine which mixes substances based on some code), could a hack of the vaccine production process alter its content (for some production series even) to make them ineffective - without us even knowing about this?

This come close to conspiracy theories, but from the technical perspective all this is rather possible (though not easy). How do we make sure that those are way beyond any red lines of ethical behaviour, particularly among states?

Source author: Vladimir Radunovic vladar@diplomacy.edu