ABSTRACT
Cyberbiosecurity combines cybersecurity and biosecurity. It pertains to the identification of risks associated with the privacy, confidentiality and maintenance of the integrity of biodata – with bio-manufacturing of commercial interest, with the intellectual property of all kinds of biodata, and finally with the use of emerging technologies in biosecurity applications. Cyberbiosecurity emerged to tackle the extreme exposure of biosciences or life sciences to cybercrime as a result of the aggressive adoption of bioinformatics and biostatistics. It addresses a diverse field of risk factors, including the denial of data resources by discrediting or invalidating the existing depositories, the unavailability of one’s own biodata, or its misuse for blackmail, and the subverting and compromising of legitimate activities (that is, biomanufacturing and individualized therapy). However, the ultimate challenge is the illicit use of biodata to produce bioweapons or bioagents, aided by the reduced cost of synthetic DNA technology and the occasionally unlimited accessibility to the genome sequences of pathogenic microorganisms.
