{"id":52922,"date":"2020-09-04T13:58:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T09:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mythdetector.ge\/?p=52922"},"modified":"2022-01-31T17:45:12","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T13:45:12","slug":"how-were-documents-about-lugar-lab-leaking-from-the-ministry-of-health-before-the-cyberattack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mythdetector.ge\/en\/how-were-documents-about-lugar-lab-leaking-from-the-ministry-of-health-before-the-cyberattack\/","title":{"rendered":"How Were Documents about Lugar Lab Leaking from the Ministry of Health before the Cyberattack?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On September 3, the Ministry of Health made a statement<\/a> that a cyberattack had been carried out on the computer system of the Ministry by foreign intelligence agents, resulting in medical documentation about Lugar Research Center being stolen and published on foreign webpages. Later, the Deputy Head of the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, Paata Imnadze, suggested<\/a>that the attack might have been carried out from Russia.<\/p>\n

This is not the first cyberattack<\/a> against the Lugar Lab. In 2018, documents were leaked from the Ministry of Health, while during the coronavirus pandemic, personal data<\/a> of Georgian scientists were published.<\/p>\n

In 2018, a Kremlin-associated Bulgarian journalist, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva\u00a0, obtained email correspondence between Davit Sergeenko, the Minister of Health, and Amiran Gamkrelidze, the Head of the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health, as well as work-related letters between the U.S. Embassy in Georgia and the Ministry of Health. The journalist published an article together with the leaked documents on Zero Hedge and tried to showcase that the Lugar Lab was experimenting on people and trying to create a biological weapon.<\/p>\n

In her article, dated September 2018, Gaytandzhieva was relying on simulated evidences that could not prove the accusations made against the Lugar Lab. The article included emails on issues such as Sergeenko\u2019s meeting with Gilead representatives in Paris, information about attendees of an event, as well as a request for freeing lab material (pathogens) from customs supervision. The correspondence did not include anything unusual, therefore it could not have been real evidence that the Lugar Lab was doing anything illegal \u2013 it was simply creating a simulation of secretly obtained documents.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n