When the Chinese hack, they don't discriminate. It is one thing you have to admire them for. So, when the Wall Street Journal says that a state-sponsored hack was looking for medical records of Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, it brought me back to an analysis I did for my first book. The Chinese were hacking telecoms at that time, and they hacked their own telecoms while they were about it. So, we had the Army hacking state-owned enterprises that provide the backbone of China's telecommunications infrastructure.
The Prime Minister has cancer so we might guess the Chinese, and lots of other countries too, might want to know how bad it is and what the prognosis is. That allows them to work on support of a replacement, if one is needed, and to find one suitable that they can support. It is just planning ahead, though a morbid use of intelligence collection. While they were at it they took about one quarter of the records of the rest of Singapore's citizens. Though nobody said China out loud, I point the finger at China because they have done the same thing in the U.S. Insurance and medical records seem to be very popular sources of intelligence. Some of the biggest hacks of medical and insurance records point to them.
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