Derek Beckham
February 13, 2022
Cybersecurity in the Biological Sciences Industry
Given your Week 5 readings associated with Cybersecurity in the Biological Sciences, as well as your knowledge gained to date, what mitigation strategies or techniques would you implement to safeguard your lab? Why? What would these strategies accomplish?
Cyberbiosecurity is an emerging field at the intersection of cybersecurity and biosecurity that aims to prevent malicious activities and protect the bioeconomy. The field is primarily concerned with:
• Identifying the potential for risk
• Developing safeguards
• Understanding the risks specific to the sciences (Porter)
Industries such as vaccine makers, agricultural production, medical devices and biological databases are all vulnerable to new security issues. Although researchers have been aware of these issues for up to a decade, it has only been during the last few years that awareness of these types of vulnerabilities is growing, especially related to the dangers of intentional manipulations. (Mueller)
There are significant implications involved in digitizing DNA, such as rights to ownership, that must be taken into consideration when securing these databases and the labs they are stored in. According to the article by Devin Coldewey, computers can be compromised by encoding malware in DNA sequences. The team at the University of Washington even succeeded in triggering a buffer over on a DNA sequencing machine. They admit that it would be difficult for malicious hackers to exploit but it could become easier in the future.
If I was in charge of safeguarding a lab, one of my top priorities would be securing all types of the biological samples. Once an individual’s DNA is digitized and hosted in a database, that individual basically loses all control of whatever happens to it. We would need to secure their samples from possible theft or modification. One possible solution could be a type of cold storage for the samples where they are only accessible offline as part of a local network. Until we can figure out a better method, none of the databases should be internet facing. Once hackers figure out a way to monetize DNA samples it might be too late to do anything about it.
References
Coldewey, D. (2017, August 10). Malicious code written into DNA infects the computer that reads it. TechCrunch. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/09/malicious-code-written-into-dna-infects-the-computer-that-reads-it/
Mueller, S. (2021). Facing the 2020 pandemic: What does Cyberbiosecurity want us to know to safeguard the future? Biosafety and Health, 3(1), 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bsheal.2020.09.007
Richardson, L. C., Connell, N. D., Lewis, S. M., Pauwels, E., & Murch, R. S. (2019). Cyberbiosecurity: A call for cooperation in a new threat landscape. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2019.00099
Rizkallah, J. (2018, November 29). Council post: Hacking humans: Protecting our DNA from Cybercriminals. Forbes. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/11/29/hacking-humans-protecting-our-dna-from-cybercriminals/