Future of Cyber Attacks: DNA-Based Malware!

Could your DNA be used as a vector for attack on devices and networks? The short answer is yes, kind of. As the line blurs everyday between science fiction and reality the incidents of security breaches are becoming more complex and deep. At the Usenix Security Conference, a group of researchers from the University of Washington presented a paper to show how they wrote malware to specifically hijack industry standard gene-sequencing devices. This was accomplished by encoding the malware into a strand of DNA. One the gene sequencer device reads the DNA strand it becomes corrupted and can be controlled remotely by an attacker.