Computer hackers could
create malicious software that crosses the line from technology to biology,
crafting viruses that could spread dangerous epidemics, researchers said at
Black Hat Europe. "We are really on the border between the living and the
not living," said Guillaume Lovet, senior manager of Fortinet's Threat
Research and Response Center, during a keynote speech discussing the
similarities between biological and computer viruses. Fortinet was the main
sponsor of the Black Hat Europe security conference in Amsterdam last week. The
comparison between computer and human viruses was made to give security
researchers a better understanding of why the human immune system is so much
better in battling viruses than antivirus systems. "We came to wonder if
there can be some kind of convergence between human viruses and computer
viruses," Lovet added. "It may sound like a scenario for a bad
Hollywood movie, but it is not such a stupid question." One of the main
things that led Fortinet researchers to that conclusion is the similarity between
computer and human
viruses. In essence they behave the same way, including information coding for
parasitic behavior inside a host system. Reasoning along this line of thought,
a Denial of Service (DoS) attack can be compared to HIV (Human immunodeficiency
virus), because both aim at overloading a system, said Ruchna Nigam, security
researcher at Fortinet.
Similar Methods of
Attack
There are other
comparisons between computer viruses and HIV. HIV attacks the immune system,
making humans more vulnerable to certain diseases. Computer viruses such as
W32/Sality also use this strategy, terminating antivirus programs and setting a
malicious program as an authorized application to bypass Microsoft's firewall. The
researchers also pointed out that both humans and computers infect themselves.
A human visiting a doctor and getting an infection is not an unthinkable
scenario, Lovet and Nigam pointed out. Likewise, computers can get infected by
visiting a website and downloading a so-called drive-by download -- malware
that is embedded in the site that tries to install itself on computers.
"This is how the ZeuS Trojan built a botnet of an estimated 3.6 million
hosts in the USA alone," noted Lovet and Axelle Apvrille, another Fortinet
researcher, in a research paper. Biological
viruses, such as the influenza virus, are also known to change upon
replication. When viruses replicate "they mutate themselves," Nigam
said. This behavior is comparable to the way the Conficker and Koobface viruses
work. It's a nightmare for security analysts, because every replicated sample
is significantly different from its predecessor. This can render antivirus
signatures, designed to detect malicious viruses, close to useless. One
important difference between these polymorphic viruses, as these adaptive
variants are known, is that computer viruses only changes form. "Only the
package is changed;" the code is not rewritten, Nigam explained.Computer
viruses like Conficker have are also known to incubate, nestling themselves on
systems to attack at a later time, which is comparable to the flu. "These
ideas are taken from the physical world," said Nigam.There are differences
between biological and computer viruses, the researchers noted. If someone
wrote the influenza virus in code, the file containing the virus would be no
bigger than 22KB. Computer viruses are far bigger than that. In addition, they
are more advanced. Biological viruses are not able to implement techniques
comparable with encryption and antidebugging tricks, the researchers noted.
This is fortunate, because drugs would have severe problems eliminating such
virus variations.However, Lovet speculates that human and computer viruses
could converge in the future. Most human viruses are essentially DNA or RNA
code, strands that contain essential genetic instructions for all known living
organisms. "In a nutshell: a biological virus is information that codes
for behavior in a host system," the researchers say. Computer viruses are
essentially the same.
Machine-Human
Interaction
The frontier between the
digital and the biological world is already blurring, the researchers said,
citing cybernetic prosthesis as a good example. Some people have several
electronic devices in their body, such as pacemakers, deep brain stimulators,
and cochlear implants, they noted. As soon as those devices communicate with an
external machine, which in most cases is necessary at some point, they become
theoretically vulnerable to computer viruses.In 2002, scientists were able to
synthesize the poliovirus. Since then, biotechnology has moved on, making it possible to synthesize bacteria, and
organisms are genetically modified almost every day, the researchers said. In
addition, all the code for synthetic DNA is stored on computers. "Seeing
that the infamous Stuxnet virus, in 2010, was able to creep through a uranium
enrichment plant, seize control of its PLC (programmable logic controller), and
destroy its centrifuging gear, one could reasonably think that a virus
infecting the computers sporting DNA databases is not outside the realm of
possibility," the researchers said in their paper. "Conversely,
software used when sequencing DNA of a living organism, and databases storing
bits that code for that sequence, are probably not absent of vulnerabilities."
But whether it is possible to make a virus with malicious DNA sequences that
could, once transcribed into bits, exploit those vulnerabilities, remains to be
seen.Using a coded virus to affect human biology for military purposes is highly
unlikely, since a spreading computer virus is much harder to control than, for
example, anthrax bacteria. Releasing a virus might backfire and infect a
nation's own army. However, bioterrorists might be interested in the use of
attacks based on such viruses, Lovet said. "And that is a very scary
thought."
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