Hackers can trick scientists into creating deadly viruses

A new type of cyberattack on DNA synthesis could trick scientists into creating dangerous viruses and toxins. Researchers at the Israel-based Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in a study titled, ‘Cyberbiosecurity: Remote DNA Injection Threat in Synthetic Biology’, published in Nature Biotechnology, highlighted the potential dangers of this biohacking techniques. “As cybersecurity becomes an increasing concern across all business sectors, the possible procurement of DNA for malicious purposes by hackers highlights the need for greater cyber-biosecurity,” researchers noted in the paper. When DNA orders are made to synthetic gene providers, synthesis providers check each requested sequence across databases of problematic sequences before order fulfilment, as per the 2010 US Health and Human Services guidelines. Besides, fulfilled orders should be revisited when new information arises and data should be shared in a privacy-preserving manner to enable detection of malicious orders deliberately distributed across multiple synthesizers “Cyber dangers are spilling over to the physical space, blurring the separation between the digital world and the real world, especially with increasing levels of automation in the biological lab,” researchers said.