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becoming a double-edged sword for life sciences clients. Recently FireEye disclosed threat posed by two Advance Persistent Threat( APT) groups which gained access to the environment of a leading pharmaceutical company for up to three years prior to detection. They stole IP and business data from the victim, information on bio cultures, products, cost reports, and other details pertaining to the company’ s operations abroad. There is nothing more important to a pharmaceutical organization than the formula for one of its new drugs.
For cyber biosecurity, employee training should be given priority. It can greatly increase an organization’ s general awareness of these new risks. Similar to biosafety training, cyberbiosecurity training modules and policies should be introduced. Secondly organizations should perform thorough analysis of its exposure to cyber biosecurity risks not covered by existing biosafety and biosecurity policies. Training exercises based on this type of analysis will encourage participants to review their workflows and identify their vulnerabilities. It is high time now to evolve a policy framework
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to detect and prevent security threats that may compromise life sciences assets. It includes guidelines on synthetic DNA targeted companies that provide DNA synthesis services to monitor research focus and relates features. Bioinformatics softwares are still not hardened against attack. Encouragement of widespread adoption of standard software best security practices like input sanitization, the use of memory safe languages or bounds checking at buffers, and regular security audits is necessary. Patching still remains challenging as the analysis software are often located in individually managed repositories and not regularly updated. One solution is to use a centralized repository to manage updates and deliver patches, similar to the APT package manager.
These could also be signed to ensure their authenticity. In the case of file sharing, the sequencing files themselves could be signed by verified research groups before uploading them to centralized databases. This is just the glimpse of long list of strategies that need immediate deployment, continuous review and improvement with time.
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Dr. Sarita Jaiswal, an exresearch officer at University of Saskatchewan, Canada, is an accomplished Plat Scientist having 15 + years of R & D experience with specialization in cereal and pulse crop biochemistry and genomics. She has been awarded twice for the category of Young Scientist( Indian Society of Plan Physiology and amp; KK Nanda Foundation for Advancement of Plant Sciences). |
Ms. Manisha Rawat, MSc( Analytical Chemistry), pursuing her career as knowledge management specialist( contractual) under the project work at INMAS, DRDO. She is well-versed in dealing with variety of chemicals especially paints and their use in artistic objects. She manages a small team of toxicologists and computer engineers for this arduous task. |
PERSONA THEME TRENDS WELL-BEING ISSUES RESEARCH NEWSCOPE |
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Volume 3 | Issue 3 | July-September 2018 51 |