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>They cheated a little by introducing a particular vulnerability into the software themselves. Wow, incredible work guys. Really a milestone here.

• subcosmos 9y ago
  Right!? We will jump through incredible hoops just to get press coverage. SMH...
• keerthiko 9y ago
  Can we slow down the hate-train for a second...as a relative security newbie, isn't this still a big deal? Isn't all malicious code is written to exploit known (or likely) vulnerabilities in software? Wasn't the point being demonstrated "you can write interpretable code on DNA that can be run on computers, which turns out, can be malicious code too"? I guess if it was already well-established that reading programmable DNA was a thing, then this is about as innovative as "you can put malicious programs on flash drives, or as email attachments." But in that case, what would they have to do that's interesting from a biotech+compsci perspective to show impressive work? Have DNA that can find security vulnerabilities on its own? Or somehow create a stack that can use a program on a DNA strand to then attack some more well-known, real security vulnerability? That seems about the same as just running code from DNA, which is what they demonstrated? But if most people aren't aware of DNA programming, isn't this still cool? Am I missing something else?