VICE (2013) s05e27 Episode Script
Russian Hacking & Contagion
1 SHANE SMITH: This week on "Vice," a deep dive into Russian hacking.
(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN) GIANNA TOBONI: Is there any personal information of mine that you couldn't have gotten access to? If someone wants to hack you, they're gonna be able to.
SMITH: And then, the race to stop the next global pandemic.
SUROOSH ALVI: We are walking into the Zika Forest.
There are mosquitoes flying all around me right now.
Doesn't fill me with warm and fuzzies.
(CHICKEN CLUCKS) DR.
LARRY BRILLIANT: Outbreaks are inevitable, pandemics are optional.
Go, go, go! MAN: We are not animals! Russia's been in the news a lot lately for allegedly hacking the 2016 US election.
The Russian government pursued a multi-faceted influence campaign in the run-up to the election, including aggressive use of cyber-capabilities.
SMITH: Russian cyber-criminals have been accused of everything from digital bank robberies to tampering with critical infrastructure.
So we sent Gianna Toboni to investigate the severity of this growing threat.
We're about an hour outside of Portland, Maine.
It's a pretty rural part of the state, and we're heading into this Sheriff's Department, because they've been hacked, along with every other police department in the county.
This is the office where we received the virus.
Um, it was downloaded from an e-mail, um, right here at this terminal.
We didn't know anything had happened until, again, the system started to slow down.
Files weren't accessible, we started getting error messages.
This is a copy of the ransom information.
Now, right on the top here it has "Cryptowall 3.
0.
" It was a readme-type file.
Um don't ask me to explain that.
Um, "What does this mean? This means that the structure and data within your files have been irrevocably changed, um, and you won't be able to work with them, read them, or see them.
" What did you end up doing after you read this? We ended up clicking on the the IT folks went to the, um and were able to locate the request for ransom that they were asking for in bitcoin.
- I'd never heard of a bitcoin - (LAUGHS) at that point, myself.
You know what I mean? You know, we're a law enforcement agency, right? And my first reaction was, "I'll be damned if I pay ransom.
" It's the cardinal rule, right? Never negotiate.
We're the police, you can't ransom us.
Which, uh, obviously I had a rude awakening there, and actually, I was really surprised when our IT folks recommended that that we pay the ransom.
We've made several changes since then, and we were not successful.
Another e-mail came through, and low and behold, we started to experience the problem again.
You guys paid twice.
What makes you think these hackers won't come back again? We've been fortunate not to have encountered the virus again, but I'm not kidding myself.
I don't believe we're a hundred percent immune.
A cyber-attack has spread to every corner of the world.
TOBONI: Lincoln County, Maine, is not alone.
Across the country, thousands of police stations, hospitals, and businesses, have been hit by ransomware attacks.
In 2016 alone, Americans paid close to a billion dollars in digital ransom.
This massive uptick in attacks has the Department of Homeland Security on high alert.
We went to their National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center to see just how dire the situation is.
(ALARM BEEPS) Thank you.
So, in order to get into this control room here, yeah, we've got to leave our phones behind.
Ultra secure in here.
Wow.
So, this is our main watch-floor for the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center.
And this is where we have our 24/7 watch operations looking for threats and incidents across the federal government and in our critical infrastructures domestically.
- We're hearing a lot about ransomware.
- Mm-hmm.
- Are you concerned about that? - Yes.
Ransomware has expanded significantly.
Existing organizations are now taking advantage of the Internet.
What is the nature of the type of hacking that we see in the US that originates in Russian-speaking countries? Everything from cyber-criminals, um, to more organized capabilities, and the Russian influence in our election process.
We put out, um, what we call a joint-analysis report back in December.
TOBONI: This report was the first time government officials published evidence of the 2016 Russian election hack, which showed Russia's ability to penetrate major American networks.
To understand why Russia has become such a hub for hacking, we traveled to Moscow.
Andrei Soldatov is an investigative journalist who recently wrote a definitive account of Russia's cyber-espionage.
Of course, it was huge news in the US when the DNC and Clinton campaign e-mails were hacked, but is there really any evidence to show that direct link? And how do we know that? So you can say with certainty that those hackers were working with the Russian government? TOBONI: To actually see Russian hacking at work, we went to one of the country's biggest gatherings of hackers.
Welcome to Russia's biggest cyber-security conference.
You have guys who are hacking into ATM machines right here, into BMWs, Teslas.
The average age here is probably 25, 26.
You have teenagers.
Everyone seems to be under 30.
Cyber-security expert and even organizer, Andrew Bershadsky, showed us around.
All right, so what are you excited about here? Can you show me some things? (RUSSIAN OVER PA SYSTEM) (SPEAKS RUSSIAN) (ANNOUNCER SPEAKS) So, what's their angle? If they attack this, what do they want to happen? TOBONI: We wanted to see hacking in real-time, so we asked former NSA hacker, Patrick Wardle, and his associate, Mikhail Sosonkin, to put my personal cyber-security to the test.
Well, you know, this was your first hacker conference, and we really wanted to make the experience very authentic, so we decided to just hack you in as many ways as possible.
While I thought our crew was filming background footage, they were in fact capturing me getting hacked.
Generally, there's two main ways to hack people: Remotely and with physical access.
Um, so we designed some attacks to do both of these.
MIKHAIL SOSONKIN: Basically, we set up wireless access points and we made it look like it was a hotel Wi-Fi.
But it was, like, a little thing that suggested the correct one it says "guest.
" So you probably thought that that's the one - you should be connecting to.
- Oh, wow.
So, when you connected to it, everything you entered in there, like your last name, your room number, we basically collected that.
Hotel room numbers it's kind of what hotels use - as an authentication key.
- Oh, my God.
And with that, then we were able to pull off a social engineering attack, which gave us a copy of your room key.
WOMAN: Good afternoon.
Could you print another key for my room, please? SOSONKIN: We needed someone to impersonate you, essentially, and we had my lovely wife, Diana, call up the reception and say, "Hey, can you please give my colleague another key?" My co-worker, Gianna, she's in room 2086.
PATRICK WARDLE: No other questions asked, they gave me a key to your room.
Then with that, we were able to gain access to your room, where we installed some hidden cameras so we could see, when you access the safe, - what the keypad was.
- TOBONI: Wow.
So, even if you had put your laptop or your phone in there, it wouldn't have mattered, - we could have gotten in.
- You could have gotten in.
So, at this point, we kind of had complete access to your laptop - There's the binary.
- Nice.
WARDLE: What we basically did was we installed something called a backdoor on your system, that would then connect out to a computer we controlled, allowing us to execute commands on your computer.
So, at that point, we could share your screen, see exactly what you were looking at at all times.
Uh, we could record off the webcam to watch you as you walked around the room, hijack your Skype sessions.
So, how did you get my credit card information? Every time you press a button, there is an event that happens in the machine, and we can capture that.
You can see here, we have your credit card information from when you were booking your trip to Cuba.
Is there any personal information of mine that you couldn't have gotten access to? I don't think so.
So, you could have hijacked my whole identity? Yeah, and you know, the attacks we pulled off here really weren't hyper sophisticated, so I always like to say, if someone wants to hack you, - they're gonna be able to.
- Yeah.
We bought you some souvenirs.
- This is, obviously, the flag of Russia.
- (LAUGHING) - Thank you very much.
- Actually, you know, we used your credit card, so.
(LAUGHING) Right.
TOBONI: Cyber-attacks originating in Russia have become increasingly brazen, including a data breach of more than 500 million Yahoo Mail accounts and a scheme that stole 160 million credit cards from American corporations.
Russian cyber-security firm, Group IB, hunts hackers.
They showed us online hacker forums filled with troves of stolen data.
We're looking at websites that are D.
C.
, US government websites, and when we click on them, you can see the username and the login.
Uh, it's all the information to access these accounts.
So, these people may not know that her e-mail has been hacked? Wow.
So, my name could be in there.
I wouldn't even know.
TOBONI: These cyber crimes are committed by blackhat hackers who can steal critical data and damage networks.
They exist anonymously on the web, but we found one who agreed to talk to us.
Hi, there.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN, DISTORTED) Gianna.
Nice to meet you.
- Gianna.
Nice to meet you.
- (DISTORTED) Hi.
TOBONI: Though he first hesitated, Kostya eventually agreed to show us some of his hacks.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN, DISTORTED) And, so, what are you doing with all this personal information? And then what will they use that information for? What's the most amount of money you've made off of a hack like this one? TOBONI: Spurred by the trillions of dollars online and a generation raised on the Web, hacking from Russia and around the world, is flourishing.
And increasingly, hackers are targeting the world's most lucrative market, the US.
But at DHS, the first line of defense are hackers themselves.
I hack into agencies, and then, after the hacking is done, I go in, and I teach them how we did it, so then, they can actually go through and fix those vulnerabilities so the actual bad guys can't get in.
That's a map of 82,000 critical infrastructures sites in the United States that are basically exposed directly to the Internet.
- Wow.
- We're talking about water systems, manufacturing plants, building automation.
When you start to aggregate it at a scale of 82,000, right, now, intruding upon a lot of those systems all at once could cause, you know, a significant issue.
How do you see cyber-attacks, uh, advancing, in the next 10, 20, 30 years? At a technical level, we're gonna be constantly evolving.
As adversaries create new capabilities, we'll create new countermeasures.
As we advance past their capabilities with countermeasures, they'll create new capabilities.
It's always gonna be that kind of arms race type of activity.
I think this problem is one that it's certainly one that we can work on, but I don't think it's ever gonna completely go away.
This is gonna be with us for a long time, I think.
Since 1980, outbreaks of infectious diseases have more than tripled worldwide.
Nearly every year, somewhere around the globe, a different disease has emerged, leading to varying degrees of infection and widespread panic.
REPORTER: Fear of Ebola in infected countries and beyond, is palpable.
Bird Flu has hit North America.
SMITH: As our world continues to become more interconnected, the threat of one of these outbreaks growing into a global pandemic is becoming increasingly real.
To see if and how we can actually prevent this next pandemic from happening, we sent Suroosh Alvi to the Zika Forest in Uganda.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) So, we are walking into the Zika Forest right now.
We're with our pals from the Uganda Virus Research Institute.
We are gonna set up some insect traps, and discover new viruses.
(MARTIN MAYANJA SPEAKS) So, this is the very tower that was used to discover the original Zika virus? It was right here? ALVI: Long before the Zika outbreak in Brazil caused global panic, it was first discovered here in Uganda in 1947.
Pathogens are constantly mutating and acquiring new traits, so researchers monitor the mosquitoes to track the emerging infections that could ignite the next pandemic.
(SIGHS) - Okay.
- (INSECTS BUZZING) There are mosquitoes flying all around me right now.
Doesn't fill me with warm and fuzzies.
Tropical forests like this are breeding grounds for new viruses.
Once untouched, human populations now destroy around seven million hectares of forest each year, allowing diseases to have an easier time getting into human populations.
There are houses right there.
There's been encroachment upon the forest, and the airport is just past the houses.
What are the implications of people living so close to this forest? ALVI: Each year, a million people are killed by diseases transmitted from mosquitoes.
And with increasing temperatures and population growth, that death toll is expected to climb in the coming years.
The Zika vaccine trials are progressing right now, and even though it's daunting to vaccinate the entire world, scientists have proven they can eliminate threats.
In 1967, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to eliminate one of the biggest killers in human history.
Dr.
Larry Brilliant was part of the team that eradicated smallpox using a very simple concept.
Instead of gong all through India or Bangladesh and trying to vaccinate everybody, we got the idea that if we gave the vaccine only to those who were closest to an infected person, and you put a ring around every infected person, with your scarce vaccine, you would abort the epidemic, and that's what worked.
We have a lot of vaccines, but the vaccines we have are for known viruses.
When the next unknown virus jumps from an animal to a human, we're not gonna have a vaccine on day one.
(CHICKEN CLUCKING) ALVI: These live bird markets are prevalent throughout the developing world, and the tight quarters that these animals are in make it very easy for pathogens and infectious disease to spread from animals to humans.
Almost 70% of human infections actually come from animals.
ALVI: Dr.
Denis Byarugaba investigates the threat of avian influenza in live bird markets.
- Standing there - Yeah? you could smell some little bit of stuff - Yeah.
- from the cages.
Now, these are aerosols that are coming from the cages.
And should there be an infection in those cages, you are automatically inhaling them.
So, that smell that I was smelling over there (LAUGHING) what you are referring to as an aerosol, is potentially really bad for us? If there was any potential pathogen that was within those poultry, the likelihood that you would pick it up from those aerosols, as the birds fluff their feathers, is very high.
There is a high concentration of poultry from different regions, where they are exposed and come in with different infections.
There is slaughtering of these birds within the markets, in very unhygienic conditions.
And if these are zoonotic, then you expose and get this infection into the human population.
Could you define or explain what zoonosis is? Zoonosis is a disease that is transmitted from animals to humans.
The typical example is, for example, influenza.
And they are quite many.
ALVI: With the population increases in these countries, should the world be afraid of a crazy bird flu pandemic at a level that we've never seen before? For now, the major threat, actually, is those diseases that we are unable to find treatment for or contain.
ALVI: Each zoonotic disease poses a unique threat.
Transmitted from bodily fluids, the deadly Ebola epidemic was exacerbated by the poorly-developed health systems and living conditions in West Africa.
The SARS outbreak was less lethal but struck wealthy countries as it went airborne and spread between people in cities and hospitals.
We are truly in the middle of the evolution of an epidemic.
ALVI: Global health systems were unprepared as these diseases devastated people around the globe.
But if a disease as deadly as Ebola can transmit through the air like SARS, the consequences would be dire.
In the Netherlands, a scientist proved just how easily this mutation could occur.
Dr.
Ron Fouchier demonstrated how he genetically modified the H5N1 bird flu virus to transmit through the air.
(DR.
FOUCHIER SPEAKS) (ALVI SPEAKS) (DR.
FOUCHIER SPEAKS) ALVI: A deadly airborne virus is potentially a nightmare scenario, so why create it? To prove that the H5N1 bird flu virus could acquire the traits of becoming airborne transmissible.
So now we can find out exactly what it takes for an animal virus to become airborne.
ALVI: Despite the breakthrough of his findings, Dr.
Fouchier's work sent shock waves through the international community.
ALVI: There were a lot of concerns about your findings being out in the public.
Yes.
So, when we submitted our manuscript for publication, the US government judged that our manuscript could be used by people to construct biological weapons of terror.
We argued that the information that we collected had to be sent back to the countries where outbreaks are occurring to inform the people about what to be on the lookout for.
You eventually did publish your findings, - is that correct? - That's correct.
We convinced the World Health Organization to have a meeting with the countries that were facing outbreaks, to explain why they would need the information.
And so the people in Uganda or in Indonesia or China who do surveillance can be on the lookout for the mutations and the biological traits associated with increased risk.
ALVI: What you're doing in the lab is happening in nature all the time.
DR.
FOUCHIER: Absolutely.
Flu pandemics happen every 20, 30 years without any involvement of scientists mad scientists or good scientists.
What we did in the lab was nothing different from what is happening in animals around the globe every day.
(SHOUTING) ALVI: When an animal virus mutates and spreads into the human population, it inevitably causes chaos and panic.
As the Ebola crisis spiraled out of control in 2014, the US government spent $2.
4 billion in response, more than a quarter of the US's entire annual global health budget, pushing scientists like Dr.
Brilliant to find more preemptive solutions for future outbreaks.
We have to strengthen public health in the poorest countries to make ourselves safe.
Human beings are only as strong as our weakest surveillance system.
This is one instance where "America first" means working with the poorest countries of the world to protect them out of selfishness, our own enlightened self-interest.
ALVI: Uganda is now at the forefront of deadly disease monitoring, with a remarkably effective bio-surveillance system that was implemented with the help of American health agencies and the US Army.
These motorcycle guys, there's a whole network of them.
They ride around, they pick up blood samples, and they take it from the local clinics to the bigger hospitals.
It was originally set up to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
And then they had the very smart idea to piggyback the examination of the blood samples for other infections like Ebola, SARS, yellow fever.
It's very lo-fi and rudimentary and cheap, but it's working.
ALVI: In 2007, 146 people were infected by a small Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
Since then, three outbreaks have emerged here, but this bio-surveillance system helped prevent each one from spreading beyond 25 infections.
DR.
BRILLIANT: It's not just surveillance of humans, it's surveillance of animals who could carry a virus that we don't know about but has potential for human disease.
(CHICKEN CLUCKS) DENIS BYARUGABA: We sample from poultry and swine, for rapid virus detection, so that immediately, we are able to detect it, before it spreads out massively to other areas.
DR.
BRILLIANT: If we have good pandemic preparation, if we find outbreaks quickly, we won't have that pandemic.
It's our option.
Outbreaks are inevitable, pandemics are optional.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYS)
(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN) GIANNA TOBONI: Is there any personal information of mine that you couldn't have gotten access to? If someone wants to hack you, they're gonna be able to.
SMITH: And then, the race to stop the next global pandemic.
SUROOSH ALVI: We are walking into the Zika Forest.
There are mosquitoes flying all around me right now.
Doesn't fill me with warm and fuzzies.
(CHICKEN CLUCKS) DR.
LARRY BRILLIANT: Outbreaks are inevitable, pandemics are optional.
Go, go, go! MAN: We are not animals! Russia's been in the news a lot lately for allegedly hacking the 2016 US election.
The Russian government pursued a multi-faceted influence campaign in the run-up to the election, including aggressive use of cyber-capabilities.
SMITH: Russian cyber-criminals have been accused of everything from digital bank robberies to tampering with critical infrastructure.
So we sent Gianna Toboni to investigate the severity of this growing threat.
We're about an hour outside of Portland, Maine.
It's a pretty rural part of the state, and we're heading into this Sheriff's Department, because they've been hacked, along with every other police department in the county.
This is the office where we received the virus.
Um, it was downloaded from an e-mail, um, right here at this terminal.
We didn't know anything had happened until, again, the system started to slow down.
Files weren't accessible, we started getting error messages.
This is a copy of the ransom information.
Now, right on the top here it has "Cryptowall 3.
0.
" It was a readme-type file.
Um don't ask me to explain that.
Um, "What does this mean? This means that the structure and data within your files have been irrevocably changed, um, and you won't be able to work with them, read them, or see them.
" What did you end up doing after you read this? We ended up clicking on the the IT folks went to the, um and were able to locate the request for ransom that they were asking for in bitcoin.
- I'd never heard of a bitcoin - (LAUGHS) at that point, myself.
You know what I mean? You know, we're a law enforcement agency, right? And my first reaction was, "I'll be damned if I pay ransom.
" It's the cardinal rule, right? Never negotiate.
We're the police, you can't ransom us.
Which, uh, obviously I had a rude awakening there, and actually, I was really surprised when our IT folks recommended that that we pay the ransom.
We've made several changes since then, and we were not successful.
Another e-mail came through, and low and behold, we started to experience the problem again.
You guys paid twice.
What makes you think these hackers won't come back again? We've been fortunate not to have encountered the virus again, but I'm not kidding myself.
I don't believe we're a hundred percent immune.
A cyber-attack has spread to every corner of the world.
TOBONI: Lincoln County, Maine, is not alone.
Across the country, thousands of police stations, hospitals, and businesses, have been hit by ransomware attacks.
In 2016 alone, Americans paid close to a billion dollars in digital ransom.
This massive uptick in attacks has the Department of Homeland Security on high alert.
We went to their National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center to see just how dire the situation is.
(ALARM BEEPS) Thank you.
So, in order to get into this control room here, yeah, we've got to leave our phones behind.
Ultra secure in here.
Wow.
So, this is our main watch-floor for the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center.
And this is where we have our 24/7 watch operations looking for threats and incidents across the federal government and in our critical infrastructures domestically.
- We're hearing a lot about ransomware.
- Mm-hmm.
- Are you concerned about that? - Yes.
Ransomware has expanded significantly.
Existing organizations are now taking advantage of the Internet.
What is the nature of the type of hacking that we see in the US that originates in Russian-speaking countries? Everything from cyber-criminals, um, to more organized capabilities, and the Russian influence in our election process.
We put out, um, what we call a joint-analysis report back in December.
TOBONI: This report was the first time government officials published evidence of the 2016 Russian election hack, which showed Russia's ability to penetrate major American networks.
To understand why Russia has become such a hub for hacking, we traveled to Moscow.
Andrei Soldatov is an investigative journalist who recently wrote a definitive account of Russia's cyber-espionage.
Of course, it was huge news in the US when the DNC and Clinton campaign e-mails were hacked, but is there really any evidence to show that direct link? And how do we know that? So you can say with certainty that those hackers were working with the Russian government? TOBONI: To actually see Russian hacking at work, we went to one of the country's biggest gatherings of hackers.
Welcome to Russia's biggest cyber-security conference.
You have guys who are hacking into ATM machines right here, into BMWs, Teslas.
The average age here is probably 25, 26.
You have teenagers.
Everyone seems to be under 30.
Cyber-security expert and even organizer, Andrew Bershadsky, showed us around.
All right, so what are you excited about here? Can you show me some things? (RUSSIAN OVER PA SYSTEM) (SPEAKS RUSSIAN) (ANNOUNCER SPEAKS) So, what's their angle? If they attack this, what do they want to happen? TOBONI: We wanted to see hacking in real-time, so we asked former NSA hacker, Patrick Wardle, and his associate, Mikhail Sosonkin, to put my personal cyber-security to the test.
Well, you know, this was your first hacker conference, and we really wanted to make the experience very authentic, so we decided to just hack you in as many ways as possible.
While I thought our crew was filming background footage, they were in fact capturing me getting hacked.
Generally, there's two main ways to hack people: Remotely and with physical access.
Um, so we designed some attacks to do both of these.
MIKHAIL SOSONKIN: Basically, we set up wireless access points and we made it look like it was a hotel Wi-Fi.
But it was, like, a little thing that suggested the correct one it says "guest.
" So you probably thought that that's the one - you should be connecting to.
- Oh, wow.
So, when you connected to it, everything you entered in there, like your last name, your room number, we basically collected that.
Hotel room numbers it's kind of what hotels use - as an authentication key.
- Oh, my God.
And with that, then we were able to pull off a social engineering attack, which gave us a copy of your room key.
WOMAN: Good afternoon.
Could you print another key for my room, please? SOSONKIN: We needed someone to impersonate you, essentially, and we had my lovely wife, Diana, call up the reception and say, "Hey, can you please give my colleague another key?" My co-worker, Gianna, she's in room 2086.
PATRICK WARDLE: No other questions asked, they gave me a key to your room.
Then with that, we were able to gain access to your room, where we installed some hidden cameras so we could see, when you access the safe, - what the keypad was.
- TOBONI: Wow.
So, even if you had put your laptop or your phone in there, it wouldn't have mattered, - we could have gotten in.
- You could have gotten in.
So, at this point, we kind of had complete access to your laptop - There's the binary.
- Nice.
WARDLE: What we basically did was we installed something called a backdoor on your system, that would then connect out to a computer we controlled, allowing us to execute commands on your computer.
So, at that point, we could share your screen, see exactly what you were looking at at all times.
Uh, we could record off the webcam to watch you as you walked around the room, hijack your Skype sessions.
So, how did you get my credit card information? Every time you press a button, there is an event that happens in the machine, and we can capture that.
You can see here, we have your credit card information from when you were booking your trip to Cuba.
Is there any personal information of mine that you couldn't have gotten access to? I don't think so.
So, you could have hijacked my whole identity? Yeah, and you know, the attacks we pulled off here really weren't hyper sophisticated, so I always like to say, if someone wants to hack you, - they're gonna be able to.
- Yeah.
We bought you some souvenirs.
- This is, obviously, the flag of Russia.
- (LAUGHING) - Thank you very much.
- Actually, you know, we used your credit card, so.
(LAUGHING) Right.
TOBONI: Cyber-attacks originating in Russia have become increasingly brazen, including a data breach of more than 500 million Yahoo Mail accounts and a scheme that stole 160 million credit cards from American corporations.
Russian cyber-security firm, Group IB, hunts hackers.
They showed us online hacker forums filled with troves of stolen data.
We're looking at websites that are D.
C.
, US government websites, and when we click on them, you can see the username and the login.
Uh, it's all the information to access these accounts.
So, these people may not know that her e-mail has been hacked? Wow.
So, my name could be in there.
I wouldn't even know.
TOBONI: These cyber crimes are committed by blackhat hackers who can steal critical data and damage networks.
They exist anonymously on the web, but we found one who agreed to talk to us.
Hi, there.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN, DISTORTED) Gianna.
Nice to meet you.
- Gianna.
Nice to meet you.
- (DISTORTED) Hi.
TOBONI: Though he first hesitated, Kostya eventually agreed to show us some of his hacks.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN, DISTORTED) And, so, what are you doing with all this personal information? And then what will they use that information for? What's the most amount of money you've made off of a hack like this one? TOBONI: Spurred by the trillions of dollars online and a generation raised on the Web, hacking from Russia and around the world, is flourishing.
And increasingly, hackers are targeting the world's most lucrative market, the US.
But at DHS, the first line of defense are hackers themselves.
I hack into agencies, and then, after the hacking is done, I go in, and I teach them how we did it, so then, they can actually go through and fix those vulnerabilities so the actual bad guys can't get in.
That's a map of 82,000 critical infrastructures sites in the United States that are basically exposed directly to the Internet.
- Wow.
- We're talking about water systems, manufacturing plants, building automation.
When you start to aggregate it at a scale of 82,000, right, now, intruding upon a lot of those systems all at once could cause, you know, a significant issue.
How do you see cyber-attacks, uh, advancing, in the next 10, 20, 30 years? At a technical level, we're gonna be constantly evolving.
As adversaries create new capabilities, we'll create new countermeasures.
As we advance past their capabilities with countermeasures, they'll create new capabilities.
It's always gonna be that kind of arms race type of activity.
I think this problem is one that it's certainly one that we can work on, but I don't think it's ever gonna completely go away.
This is gonna be with us for a long time, I think.
Since 1980, outbreaks of infectious diseases have more than tripled worldwide.
Nearly every year, somewhere around the globe, a different disease has emerged, leading to varying degrees of infection and widespread panic.
REPORTER: Fear of Ebola in infected countries and beyond, is palpable.
Bird Flu has hit North America.
SMITH: As our world continues to become more interconnected, the threat of one of these outbreaks growing into a global pandemic is becoming increasingly real.
To see if and how we can actually prevent this next pandemic from happening, we sent Suroosh Alvi to the Zika Forest in Uganda.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) So, we are walking into the Zika Forest right now.
We're with our pals from the Uganda Virus Research Institute.
We are gonna set up some insect traps, and discover new viruses.
(MARTIN MAYANJA SPEAKS) So, this is the very tower that was used to discover the original Zika virus? It was right here? ALVI: Long before the Zika outbreak in Brazil caused global panic, it was first discovered here in Uganda in 1947.
Pathogens are constantly mutating and acquiring new traits, so researchers monitor the mosquitoes to track the emerging infections that could ignite the next pandemic.
(SIGHS) - Okay.
- (INSECTS BUZZING) There are mosquitoes flying all around me right now.
Doesn't fill me with warm and fuzzies.
Tropical forests like this are breeding grounds for new viruses.
Once untouched, human populations now destroy around seven million hectares of forest each year, allowing diseases to have an easier time getting into human populations.
There are houses right there.
There's been encroachment upon the forest, and the airport is just past the houses.
What are the implications of people living so close to this forest? ALVI: Each year, a million people are killed by diseases transmitted from mosquitoes.
And with increasing temperatures and population growth, that death toll is expected to climb in the coming years.
The Zika vaccine trials are progressing right now, and even though it's daunting to vaccinate the entire world, scientists have proven they can eliminate threats.
In 1967, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to eliminate one of the biggest killers in human history.
Dr.
Larry Brilliant was part of the team that eradicated smallpox using a very simple concept.
Instead of gong all through India or Bangladesh and trying to vaccinate everybody, we got the idea that if we gave the vaccine only to those who were closest to an infected person, and you put a ring around every infected person, with your scarce vaccine, you would abort the epidemic, and that's what worked.
We have a lot of vaccines, but the vaccines we have are for known viruses.
When the next unknown virus jumps from an animal to a human, we're not gonna have a vaccine on day one.
(CHICKEN CLUCKING) ALVI: These live bird markets are prevalent throughout the developing world, and the tight quarters that these animals are in make it very easy for pathogens and infectious disease to spread from animals to humans.
Almost 70% of human infections actually come from animals.
ALVI: Dr.
Denis Byarugaba investigates the threat of avian influenza in live bird markets.
- Standing there - Yeah? you could smell some little bit of stuff - Yeah.
- from the cages.
Now, these are aerosols that are coming from the cages.
And should there be an infection in those cages, you are automatically inhaling them.
So, that smell that I was smelling over there (LAUGHING) what you are referring to as an aerosol, is potentially really bad for us? If there was any potential pathogen that was within those poultry, the likelihood that you would pick it up from those aerosols, as the birds fluff their feathers, is very high.
There is a high concentration of poultry from different regions, where they are exposed and come in with different infections.
There is slaughtering of these birds within the markets, in very unhygienic conditions.
And if these are zoonotic, then you expose and get this infection into the human population.
Could you define or explain what zoonosis is? Zoonosis is a disease that is transmitted from animals to humans.
The typical example is, for example, influenza.
And they are quite many.
ALVI: With the population increases in these countries, should the world be afraid of a crazy bird flu pandemic at a level that we've never seen before? For now, the major threat, actually, is those diseases that we are unable to find treatment for or contain.
ALVI: Each zoonotic disease poses a unique threat.
Transmitted from bodily fluids, the deadly Ebola epidemic was exacerbated by the poorly-developed health systems and living conditions in West Africa.
The SARS outbreak was less lethal but struck wealthy countries as it went airborne and spread between people in cities and hospitals.
We are truly in the middle of the evolution of an epidemic.
ALVI: Global health systems were unprepared as these diseases devastated people around the globe.
But if a disease as deadly as Ebola can transmit through the air like SARS, the consequences would be dire.
In the Netherlands, a scientist proved just how easily this mutation could occur.
Dr.
Ron Fouchier demonstrated how he genetically modified the H5N1 bird flu virus to transmit through the air.
(DR.
FOUCHIER SPEAKS) (ALVI SPEAKS) (DR.
FOUCHIER SPEAKS) ALVI: A deadly airborne virus is potentially a nightmare scenario, so why create it? To prove that the H5N1 bird flu virus could acquire the traits of becoming airborne transmissible.
So now we can find out exactly what it takes for an animal virus to become airborne.
ALVI: Despite the breakthrough of his findings, Dr.
Fouchier's work sent shock waves through the international community.
ALVI: There were a lot of concerns about your findings being out in the public.
Yes.
So, when we submitted our manuscript for publication, the US government judged that our manuscript could be used by people to construct biological weapons of terror.
We argued that the information that we collected had to be sent back to the countries where outbreaks are occurring to inform the people about what to be on the lookout for.
You eventually did publish your findings, - is that correct? - That's correct.
We convinced the World Health Organization to have a meeting with the countries that were facing outbreaks, to explain why they would need the information.
And so the people in Uganda or in Indonesia or China who do surveillance can be on the lookout for the mutations and the biological traits associated with increased risk.
ALVI: What you're doing in the lab is happening in nature all the time.
DR.
FOUCHIER: Absolutely.
Flu pandemics happen every 20, 30 years without any involvement of scientists mad scientists or good scientists.
What we did in the lab was nothing different from what is happening in animals around the globe every day.
(SHOUTING) ALVI: When an animal virus mutates and spreads into the human population, it inevitably causes chaos and panic.
As the Ebola crisis spiraled out of control in 2014, the US government spent $2.
4 billion in response, more than a quarter of the US's entire annual global health budget, pushing scientists like Dr.
Brilliant to find more preemptive solutions for future outbreaks.
We have to strengthen public health in the poorest countries to make ourselves safe.
Human beings are only as strong as our weakest surveillance system.
This is one instance where "America first" means working with the poorest countries of the world to protect them out of selfishness, our own enlightened self-interest.
ALVI: Uganda is now at the forefront of deadly disease monitoring, with a remarkably effective bio-surveillance system that was implemented with the help of American health agencies and the US Army.
These motorcycle guys, there's a whole network of them.
They ride around, they pick up blood samples, and they take it from the local clinics to the bigger hospitals.
It was originally set up to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
And then they had the very smart idea to piggyback the examination of the blood samples for other infections like Ebola, SARS, yellow fever.
It's very lo-fi and rudimentary and cheap, but it's working.
ALVI: In 2007, 146 people were infected by a small Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
Since then, three outbreaks have emerged here, but this bio-surveillance system helped prevent each one from spreading beyond 25 infections.
DR.
BRILLIANT: It's not just surveillance of humans, it's surveillance of animals who could carry a virus that we don't know about but has potential for human disease.
(CHICKEN CLUCKS) DENIS BYARUGABA: We sample from poultry and swine, for rapid virus detection, so that immediately, we are able to detect it, before it spreads out massively to other areas.
DR.
BRILLIANT: If we have good pandemic preparation, if we find outbreaks quickly, we won't have that pandemic.
It's our option.
Outbreaks are inevitable, pandemics are optional.
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