CYBERBIOSECURITY

Computer science, engineering and data science have transformed how biology and biotechnology are studied, built and applied across the European Union and worldwide. As biotechnology has become intertwined with laboratory automation, shared datasets and computational biology, it has grown far more accessible. That wider reach has produced new security problems, known as "cyberbiosecurity threats." The field sits where biotechnology, biosecurity and cybersecurity meet.

The term was first proposed in 2018 to name an emerging discipline at the junction of cybersecurity, cyber-physical security and biosecurity, as these apply to biological and biomedical systems. Biosecurity has traditionally aimed to limit the risk that life science tools or knowledge will be misused, while cybersecurity protects information held in technology-based systems. The combined discipline addresses the possibility, or reality, of malicious destruction, misuse or exploitation of valuable information, processes and materials where the life sciences meet the digital world.

The book lays out the groundwork for an assessment framework that considers both security and resilience in physical and cyber settings. Its method draws on proven tools from infrastructure assessment, including decision science, physical security, infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity, and combines them with newer areas such as biotechnology, biomanufacturing and genomics. The goal is an approach that is flexible and defensible for identifying and reducing vulnerabilities.