The attack on the European Medicines Agency in December and subsequent leaking of altered documents revealed late last week has highlighted the potential of disinformation campaigns to be life-threatening. We saw similar tactics used in the run-up to the US presidential election, which threatened to erode public trust. Now, with global health on the line, governments around the world cannot afford to have their citizens lose trust in their ability to protect them. This has real-world implications, potentially leading to people not getting vaccinated and leaving themselves and loved ones vulnerable to a dangerous virus. 

It is very important that public institutions have a good breadth and depth of security to defend against these types of attacks. From identifying where education needs to take place, systems that can build a broad foundation of security into the public sector infrastructure, through to technology that works deep in the network and can identify anomalous behaviour. Ultimately, by coordinating threat intelligence and response between governments and industry, resilience to disinformation campaigns and the subversive methods used by cybercriminals can be built.