A partnership between Sandia National Laboratories and BioBright to improve the security of synthetic biology equipment has become more relevant after the United States and others issued warnings that hackers were using the COVID-19 pandemic to increase their activities.
“In the past decade, genomics and synthetic biology have grown from principally academic pursuits to a major industry,” said computational biology manager Corey Hudson. “This shift paves the way toward rapid production of small molecules on demand, precision healthcare and advanced materials.”
Sandia and BioBright are working to develop better security for this new commercial field. Right now, large amounts of sensitive data about patients’ health and pharmaceutical information are being handled with security models developed two decades ago for academic needs and not industrial risks, Hudson said.
“Modern synthetic biology and pharmaceutical workflows rely on digital tools. Instruments and software that were designed before security was such an important consideration,” Charles Fracchia, BioBright CEO, said.
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On May 5, the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre issued a joint alert warning that malicious hackers were exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as part of their attacks.
Hudson and his team are collaborating with Fracchia’s team at BioBright, a company that provides secure data collection and analysis to biotech and pharmaceutical companies. They are working to help better secure synthetic biology operations and genomic data across industry, government and academia, protecting America’s bioeconomy and digital infrastructure. Using Emulytics, a research initiative developed at Sandia for evaluating realistic threats against critical systems, the teams are developing countermeasures to the risks.
The initial work done by Hudson his team was funded through Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. The collaboration with BioBright is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through the Safe Genes project.