This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Hayley Dixon, Aisha Majid, and Steven Swinford report:
A British surgeon who helped carry out operations in Aleppo fears that the hacking of his computer led to a hospital being bombed by suspected Russian warplanes.
In a world first, renowned consultant David Nott gave remote instructions via Skype and WhatsApp which allowed doctors to carry out surgery in an underground hospital.
But, after footage was broadcast by the BBC, Mr Nott believes his computer was targeted, allowing hackers to gain the coordinates of the M10 hospital.
Weeks later a “bunker buster” bomb destroyed the M10 when warplanes, believed to be Russian, delivered a direct hit to the operating theatre, killing two patients and permanently closing the hospital.
Read more on The Telegraph.
Where are the whitehats to help these doctors secure their communications enough to enable remote surgery without blackhats being able to interfere or steal valuable intel?
What a sensational article. There are so many implied assumptions in the story the title could have been “Hospital collapses days after remote-assisted surgery” and it would be just as accurate a title. There’s no real evidence that the place was bombed. They “think” it was. Jeez.
The conclusion is that the hospital was bombed because this doc thinks his computer was hacked. Ok. Why does he think that? In what part of an online chat are very specific lat/long coordinates exchanged?
Perhaps exif data from a phone? Well, if this was literally underground, I doubt GPS would work, so that’s probably not reliable.
Wow. I went back to the post and see that when I added a comment under the link to the source, I overwrote what I had originally written there, which was a comment about how “believe” is not the same thing as proof. My original comment was that if you assume, for now, that the doctor’s belief is correct because you don’t want to take unnecessary risks,then…...
So yes, I agree with your comment completely. I couldn’t understand why there was no forensics involved or reported, either.