Genetic data technology is on the rise, such as CRISPR, and it’s showing promise with making successful impacts when it comes to editing DNA, cures for genetic diseases, and more. Although gene editing has endless opportunities to be innovated or improved as a medical godsend, it could also be a horrific cyber weapon. As next-level CRISPR seems to be, it can also have a dark side such as unethical hacking through the same system meant to help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The University of Washington’s findings explored how synthetic DNA is able to be exploited to carry malicious code and was successful in embedding viable commands via DNA. To be alive in a time where scientists can turn a DNA strand into malware that is capable of hacking into the computer that analyzes it, is astounding. This experiment displayed the vulnerabilities in the software tool used by scientists and researchers all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The article “Hacking Humans: Protecting Our DNA from Cybercriminals<\/em>” brings another issue that should be focused on and that is the privacy of data. As the number of humans start to participate in genetic testing or medical research (an example would be 23andMe), their DNA is stored digitally in massive databases. There isn’t much data on what can happen with having someone’s DNA stored in a database, but all DNA is unique to an individual. It could be used to help diagnose, or look at historical evidence, or for more nefarious reasons such as discriminating against in the job market, insurance, or worse, targeting for horrific crimes against something in their DNA such as having red hair, being from a certain ethnicity, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To paint the picture of what is most important when it comes to all of this, it boils down to having a framework solely for genetic data technology similar to the NIST CF so that organizations are able to build upon this blueprint to enhance safeguards around the databases and genetic software systems. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Genetic data technology is on the rise, such as CRISPR, and it’s showing promise with making successful impacts when it comes to editing DNA, cures for genetic diseases, and more. Although gene editing has endless opportunities to be innovated or improved as a medical godsend, it could also be a horrific cyber weapon. As next-level… <\/p>\n