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?
After looking over this week’s readings and doing a little independent research I find the topic of cyberbiosecurity to be very difficult. Not so much in a mental understanding concept, but one of the difficult ways to map strategies in order to gain the upper hand in security. The articles for this week’s readings talked about how DNA is becoming digitized and both the risks and rewards that come along with it. The articles mostly focus on the risks that digitizing DNA brings.
DNA being ‘the ultimate personally identifying information (PII)’ brings many concerns to the act of digitalizing DNA. As stated in the article Hacking Humans, a data breach that ends in stolen DNA is a lot more invasive than something along the lines of a social security number or bank account. This severity means that there has to be utmost security for these labs. Along with the ability to maintain the upper hand against the cybercriminals that seek this sort of data.
My main focus would be to stay ahead of possible data breaches and implement a solid framework for my lab. I would do this by placing attention on searching for vulnerabilities in our security and ways of safeguarding them. This would allow my team to see where our security is lacking and improve it where needed. As well as put my teams’ heads as constantly thinking like a white-hat hacker. This process would allow brainstorms on other possible ways our data could be harmed or stolen and to prevent the situations from ever becoming a reality.

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