Cyber-Biosecurity: An Emerging National Security Frontier

Cyber-Biosecurity, an emerging threat landscape at the intersection of cybersecurity, cyber-physical security and biosecurity has a potential to disrupt economic, social and political well-being of the nation and has tremendous national security implications. All forms of cyber-attacks impact the manufacturing industries, governments, health infrastructure, patients and bio-economy at large. Rapidly evolving Cyber-Biosecurity threat landscape has potential to disrupt the rapid growth of Indian bio-economy by compromising data security and intellectual property, disrupting manufacturing operations and supply chains resulting in destabilising investor confidence in Indian Bio-economy. Indian National Security Framework too needs to have comprehensive Cyber-Biosecurity policy and infrastructure in place before the biological equivalent of Metasploit becomes commonplace. Some important considerations for the same are the not-so-covert ongoing conflicts in the cyberspace with a probability of boiling over to the Cyber-Biosecurity landscape, and ‘Defend Forward’ as deterrence policy of many nations. India urgently needs to address the need for robust Cyber-Biosecurity legal infrastructure and comprehensive policy formation with the proactive participation of all the stakeholders.