Scientists successfully infiltrate computer using malware coded into DNA

In what reads like science fiction becoming reality, researchers at the University of

Washington have been able to successfully infect a computer with malware coded into a strand of DNA. In order to see if a computer could be compromised in that way, the team included a known security vulnerability in a DNA-processing program before creating a synthetic DNA strand with the malicious code embedded. A computer then analyzed the “infected” strand, and as a result of the malware in the DNA, the researchers were able to remotely exploit the computer. The results were published in a recent paper. “We wanted to understand what new computer security risks are possible in the interaction between biomolecular information and the computer systems that analyze it,” the researchers wrote, led by Tadayoshi Kohno, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.                                                                                                    https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/11/16130568/scientists-infiltrate-computer-malware-code-dna