The Chinese news agency Zhōngguó Xīnwén (ZX) announced today that the recent shutdown of port facilities in Shanghai was due to a cyber attack on computer systems being used to monitor COVID-19 infections. COVID detectors in the Shanghai sewer system reported positive detection of COVID in the neighborhood where most port workers were housed last month. As part of the Chinese zero-COVID policy, the neighborhood was put into 100% lockdown, and port operations had to be shutdown.
Lin Piao, spokesperson for the Shanghai Medical Directorate, told ZX that the Chinese government had started installing electronic detectors for COVID in the wastewater systems in Shanghai as a method for more precisely targeting the lockdowns that the government was using to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. “When these detectors report the presence of COVID-19 antigens in the sewer outflow of a district,” Lin Piao was reported to have said: “We know for certain that there are individuals in that district who have been infected with the disease.”
The ZX news report does not name the source for the cyberattack, but it does note that a Chinese Army cybersecurity unit is investigating the attack. This would typically mean that the government felt that there was a possibility that the attack could have been initiated by a foreign power.
The COVID sewer detectors were developed by scientists at the Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Chinese government has been deploying these sensors in sewer systems in large cities throughout the country as a way to effectively fight the COVID pandemic while reducing the economic cost of pandemic lockdowns.
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