What can biosecurity learn from cybersecurity? A lot

Source Domain: tynmagazine.com

Consider the past few years. A global pandemic revealed how quickly a biological threat can spread through tightly coupled economies and fragile health systems. At the same time, ransomware attacks—in which data is encrypted and access restored only upon payment of a ransom—repeatedly disrupted hospitals, pipelines, and public services, demonstrating how small groups operating in the digital domain can impose widespread disruption. These crises did not occur in isolation. They exposed a deeper reality: The infrastructures that sustain modern life are simultaneously vulnerable to biological risk and digital exploitation.

Yet biosecurity measures meant to prevent or mitigate human-made biological risks remain largely anchored in conceptual frameworks inherited from the nuclear era, like arms control agreements and export controls. These frames focus on threats and risks that are imagined as episodic, visible, and bounded—something to be deterred or prohibited. That framing has helped sustain a powerful taboo against biological weapons. But it is increasingly misaligned with the kinds of challenges emerging from rapid advances in biotechnology and the broader technological environment.

The governance problems now emerging in the biological domain do not relate simply to preventing misuse of a single material, facility, or piece of equipment; they are about managing risk in a world in which biological capability is distributed across scientific networks, digital infrastructures, and global supply chains. These challenges look less like the nuclear deterrence standoff and more like those long familiar in the cybersecurity realm: persistent intrusion, ambiguous actor identities and motivations, and the need to manage risk rather than eliminate it. Cyber policy has spent decades grappling with conditions that biosecurity is only beginning to confront.

Persistent risks. Both cyber and biological risks are characterized by lower barriers to entry than in traditional…

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