Here is link to recent New Yorker story on Atlanta cyberattack (Atlanta is home of the Center for Disease Control, btw):
And things that make you go 'hmmm'-reminded me of all the bots out of Georgia related to the 2016 election that were actually originating from Russia:
"One has to wonder, why is Georgia suddenly the capital of bot tweets?
The researchers were unable to identify who was responsible for any of the 400,000 artificial intelligence social bots that tweeted night and day about the presidential election. They also had no explanation for why so many of them originated in Georgia. But an incident nearly two years ago may, in fact, shed some light on why Georgia might matter, and why so many of the AI social bots originated from the Peach State.
In June 2015, the New York Times published an extraordinary story by Adrian Chen about how an army of well-paid "trolls" – working from a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia - had tried to wreak havoc in several targeted American communities and, eventually, across the internet.
One of the Russian troll factory's earliest experiments was an effort to generate fake news about the appearance of the Ebola virus in and around Atlanta, Georgia – and then spread it across the internet through the use of social media, Chen reported.
That fake news effort by the Russian troll factory was followed almost immediately by a second fake news story, also in Georgia, that spread throughout social media about an unarmed black woman shot by police in Atlanta.
Both stories in Georgia were generated by fake news that piggybacked on real concerns in America. Both fake news stories were created by the Russian troll factory, Chen wrote, and then socialized from there. Both were almost certainly experiments by the troll factory that someone in Russia had decided to test two years out from the presidential election.
"On Dec. 13 (2014), two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread (an earlier hoax) began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta," Chen wrote. "The campaign followed the same pattern of fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in Atlanta. (The) attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort."
Simultaneously, Chen wrote, the Russian troll factory tested a second fake news story in Georgia.
"On the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta. Here again, the hoax seemed designed to piggyback on real public anxiety," he wrote.