Canada’s intelligence agency said Monday (April 12) that Chinese and Russian espionage and interference intensified in 2020 to the highest level since the end of the Cold War, in part because of vulnerabilities created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“COVID-19 has created an ever rapidly changing environment that creates an exploitable situation for threat actors seeking to advance their own interests.” David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (abbreviated as CSIS), said in the CSIS annual report.
The report said the spike in foreign espionage last year was linked to an increasing number of people working from home because of the epidemic.
“Foreign threat actors, including hostile intelligence units and the agencies working for them, sought to exploit the social and economic environment created by the epidemic” to gather valuable intelligence, the Security Intelligence Service said.
Vigneault said, “In 2020, CSIS monitored the highest level of espionage and foreign interventions since the Cold War.”
Vigneault also said in February that the Chinese Communist Party posed a serious strategic threat, Reuters reported. Canadian intelligence agencies also identified state-sponsored programs in China (CCP), Russia, Iran and North Korea as cybercrime threats for the first time last November.
A new report released Monday by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians of Canada (NSICOP), which oversees Canada’s security and intelligence units, also flagged the emergence of a significant number of pandemic-related espionage.
Liberal MP David McGuinty, who chairs the committee, said the pandemic is prompting some foreign countries to step up their spying, interference and cyber threats against Canada, including companies involved in vaccine development.
CSIS said that one of the ways foreign actors gathered political, economic and military information in Canada last year was through “non-traditional collectors,” such as researchers and private entities.
The NSICOP report specifically mentions the Chinese Communist Party’s “Thousand Talents Program. The report mentions the Thousand Talents Program, which was launched in 2008 to encourage Chinese scientists abroad to bring their research to China, and is currently under investigation by the United States.
Intelligence agencies say Russian organizations have also tried to steal COVID-19 vaccine research from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
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