Vici talent programme continues despite NWO hack
ZonMw able to assess shared grant requests
Vici talent programme continues despite NWO hack
Door Giulia Fabrizi
By Giulia Fabrizi
Giulia Fabrizi
Van uit de hand gelopen studentenfeestjes tot bezette universiteitsgebouwen en van kamertekorten tot dreigende bezuinigingen: Giulia houdt al het nieuws in de gaten. Ze praat graag met de mensen die het aangaat, schrijft erover en begeleidt freelancers bij het maken van nieuwsartikelen. Eerder werkte ze als stadsredacteur Groningen en gemeenteverslaggever Haren voor Dagblad van het Noorden.The annual Vici grants planned for March will be evaluated, among others. The Rubicon, scheduled for April, will also still go ahead. Both are partnerships with ZonMw, the financier for innovation and research in the healthcare sector. While the NWO portion of the subsidy procedure will not go ahead, the ZonMw portion will.
It also concerns several programmes from the Dutch Research Agenda’s programme line 2. The NWO says the processes on the ZonMw systems can still go ahead. Anything that goes through the NWO systems will be delayed, however.
Hack
The NWO has been held hostage since February 8 by a group of well-known cyber criminals that call themselves DoppelPaymer. They hacked the organisation’s systems, which means that grant applications at NWO as well as at coordinating bodies SIA and NRO are currently frozen.
The hackers are demanding a ransom to release the network, but so far, NWO has refused to pay it. In an effort to force the organisation’s hand, DoppelPaymer started publishing internal NWO documents to the dark web.
Phishing
The UG warned its staff and students to be wary of emails sent from NWO, SIA, or NRO addresses because of the hack, since there’s a chance they might be phishing emails.
‘People are on edge about phishing’, says Sander van Lien, the CIT’s communication officer. On Tuesday morning, an email was sent out to all students and staff about the upcoming university elections. ‘The service desk received a lot of questions about where that email came from. It’s good that people are so alert’, he says.