Boston Globe: We Need to Reach a Deal with the Regime That Tried to Hack Our Local Children’s Hospital

FBI director Christopher Wray, speaking at the Boston Conference on Cyber Security yesterday:

In the summer of 2021, hackers sponsored by the Iranian government tried to conduct one of the most despicable cyberattacks I’ve seen—right here in Boston—when they decided to go after Boston Children’s Hospital.

Let me repeat that, Boston Children’s Hospital.

We got a report from one of our intelligence partners indicating Boston Children’s was about to be targeted. And, understanding the urgency of the situation, the cyber squad in our Boston Field Office raced to notify the hospital.

Our folks got the hospital’s team the information they needed to stop the danger right away. We were able to help them ID and then mitigate the threat.

And quick actions by everyone involved, especially at the hospital, protected both the network and the sick kids who depend on it.

It’s a great example of why we deploy in the field the way we do, enabling that kind of immediate, before-catastrophe-strikes response.

The editorial board of the Boston Globe, also Wednesday, under the headline “Biden shouldn’t let bad optics sink a restored nuclear deal with Iran”:

Negotiators have arrived at a point where restoring the Iran nuclear deal is possible, but one significant political obstacle remains: Iran is insisting that the United States take its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off this country’s terrorist list.

Reportedly, President Biden has rejected that demand absent some kind of significant concession from Iran. The White House isn’t commenting, but if that becomes a sticking point that keeps the deal from being resurrected, it will be a foreign-policy blunder.

It is never a good day to make the argument that the U.S. should offer more concessions to the Iranian regime in order to restore a deal that trusted the Iranians to not secretly continue work on a nuclear bomb. But the day Americans learned that the regime tried to hack and shut down the nearest children’s hospital seems like a particularly terrible day to make that argument.

Some regimes are just too malevolent, too despicable, too cruel, too barbaric, and too implacably hostile to our people to be trusted on matters as important as this. The Iranian regime is one of them.