
Those increasingly popular mail-away genetic test kits that promise to analyze everything from your ancestry to your risk of cancer may be vulnerable to a host of computer hacks that could expose your personal genetic information, according to a new study from the University of Washington.
The researchers were even able to encode a strand of synthetic DNA to contain malware, allowing them to take remote control of a computer being used to sequence and process genetic data.
They stress that it was extremely tough to create their rogue DNA, even with a crack team of biologists and computer scientists working on it. So the risk of such malware hijacking a sequencer is small.
This is an alarmist article that is useless for people who have had their DNA sequenced because the article does not say which companies are good and which ones could be hacked. I wish you would have waited for more facts before you wrote.