Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Identifies Potential Security Hole In Genomic Data-Sharing Network
An anonymous reader writes: Sharing genomic information among researchers is critical to the advance of biomedical research. Yet genomic data contains identifiable information and, in the wrong hands, poses a risk to individual privacy. If someone had access to your genome sequence — either directly from your saliva or other tissues, or from a popular genomic information service — they could check to see if you appear in a database of people with certain medical conditions, such as heart disease, lung cancer or autism. Work by a pair of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine makes that genomic data more secure. Researches have demonstrated a technique for hacking a network of global genomic databases and how to prevent it. They are working with investigators from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health on implementing preventive measures.
You're flat-out an idiot if you give your DNA to any database of any kind anywhere. Electronic medical records are likely just as bad though, I have no doubts that all your EMRs are going straight into a government (FBI, NSA, etc) database as just one more means to track the average citizen. Of course just giving a blood sample is probably getting you into a government shadow DNA database anyway so I guess it doesn't matter.
Recognizing that a particular genome contains sequences related to heart disease or lung cancer in no way makes it identifiable or linked to a particular person. This is just another scare mongering story, probably clickbait ... nothing to see here, please move along.
The lesson, which the world teaches you daily in the headlines is once data and PID is in electronic form, unless it's encrypted and never decrypted (and thus useless for analysis using today's technology) then it is not safe and WILL be exposed, revealed, possibly leveraged against you in both likely and forseen and unlikely and unforeseen ways.
The lesson is- never believe anyone who tells you that your data is secure.
The implications are- anything you say or do may be used against you. So act as though that's true.
I'd be disappointed if the stupid app posts aren't automatically posted by an app. It would be too sad if a person is manually posting that to every article.
Dynamite is for cows, you're all cows ... send in the cows, there ought to be cows.
In Soviet Russia, meme pukes you!
Get over it. Slashdot has always had the drivel, and has always had people complaining about the drivel.
Just be glad time cube guy and the poop guy have slowed down.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hey buddy, I wouldn't mind if the trolls and shitposters would show a little creativity and originality, but it's the same copypasta over and over again, like they're high-functioning autism-spectrum disorder sufferers or something; if it's going to be noise instead of signal, can it at least be interesting noise?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
LOL .... awww, I suppose you want a puppy, a pony, a unicorn, and red rider BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time?
If they posted interesting stuff, they wouldn't be trolls and shitposters, now, would they?
Deep breath, and repeat after me ... the internet is full of stupid, and there's nothing I can do about that.
You're gonna hurt yourself if you keep on like that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh for fuck's sake, dude.. I suppose you think I'm frothing at the mouth and covering my monitor with spittle or something in anger over shitposters on slashdot? Please. And, there's nonsense, then there's interesting, entertaining nonsense. This repetitive 'apps' crap is neither, it's just boring.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
(I realize I'm a day late to this thread, but this is worth getting on the record)
This is genomics 101: your genome is unique to you. This is no different than saying if someone had a picture of you they could identify you in other pictures. Given that genomes and photos are digitized, from a computational perspective there's really no difference. Lesson: if you don't like posting your photo publically, don't post your genome.
Now, the real problem with genomic data security is that there isn't any and it's much uglier than what you can glean from public databases. A few examples:
- Most sequencing instruments (which contain decent computers and sometimes small clusters) still use the default vendor passwords
- All instruments run out of date operating systems (old Ubuntu for ION Torrent, about-to-be-eol'd Windows 7 for Illumina)
- Bioinformatics has a fetish for virtual machines running everything as root and misplaced trust in docker - in both cases, to access the large filesystems needed for processing genomes, they simply mount the filesystems and bypass standard security checks
- Many popular packages make system calls that are vulnerable to inject attacks
- Most server tools encourage running everything as a privileged user, often explicitly claiming that it's to "make things easier for the user"
The list goes on. What's scary is that we're building our clinical genomics infrastructure on top of these tools and practices. The only good news is that the black hat community is probably more interested in using these resources for bot nets rather than anything genomically nefarious.