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Researching the weapons of the future: genetically modified bioweapons

By Andy Oppenheimer

Advances in nanotechnology, genetics and nuclear isomers are permitting the production of a new generation of unconventional weapons.

As one of the most rapidly moving areas of scientific research today, biotechnology presents the most immediate emerging threat for weapons development. The revolution in genetic modification (GM) techniques could create even deadlier strains of disease and provide cheaper methods of development, as well as blurring the dividing line between curing disease and causing it. Terrorists and nation-states with adequate biological expertise could capitalise on the GM revolution using minimal resources and equipment. Unscrupulous scientists lending or selling their services to terrorist groups could also exploit many advances taking place at medical and biological institutes as civilian research and development.

An obvious conclusion is that smallpox, anthrax and other diseases are deadly enough without being modified. While smallpox itself is believed to kill 30 per cent of the people it infects, it is not likely to affect vaccinated populations; a GM smallpox virus, however, that cannot be countered by vaccination would doubtless be much more lethal.

GM weapons are not new. The Soviet civilian biological warfare agency, Biopreparat, from 1973 experimented with various harmful and antidote-resistant organisms, including a combination of smallpox with Venezuelan equine encephalitis, known as ‘Veepox’. Russia also developed ‘Obolensk’ anthrax - a strain resistant to both vaccines and antibiotics.

With the application of GM techniques, up to 100 times more pathogens or toxins could be produced per cell than by naturally occurring strains. It would be possible to insert genes into infectious micro-organisms to increase their antibiotic resistance, virulence and environmental stability. For example, the gene for antibiotic resistance could be removed from the notorious hospital ‘superbug,’ staphylococcus aureus, which is antibiotic-resistant. This could then be transferred into a far more dangerous organism like the plague, thereby making plague, which in its bubonic form is curable, extremely difficult to treat.

One of the problems of creating and delivering a biological weapon is maintaining its survival once it has been dispersed. The agents in many existing bioweapons do not spread easily or at all. Bioagents could be genetically modified to have enhanced hardiness to facilitate delivery and dissemination and to increase infectivity. Making a pathogen survive longer under specified environmental conditions, and be difficult or impossible to detect, may soon be possible.

Source: http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jcbw/jcbw040914_1_n.shtml
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Microsoft warns of poisoned picture peril

By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus

Published Wednesday 15th September 2004 07:39 GMT

The old bromide that promises you can't get a computer virus by looking at
an image file crumbled a bit further Tuesday when Microsoft announced a
critical vulnerability in its software's handling of the ubiquitous JPEG
graphics format.

The security hole is a buffer overflow that potentially allows an attacker
to craft a special JPEG file that would take control of a victim's machine
when the user views it through Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, and other
programs. The poisoned picture could be displayed on a website, sent in
email, or circulated on a P2P network.

Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Office XP are vulnerable. Older versions
of Windows are also at risk if the user has installed any of a dozen other
Microsoft applications that use the same flawed code, the company said in
its advisory. The newly-released Windows XP Service Pack 2 does not contain
the hole, but vulnerable versions of Office running atop it can still be
attacked if left unpatched. Patches are available from Microsoft's website.

The company said it's not aware of the hole being publicly exploited in the
wild, and has not seen any examples of proof of concept code.

The JPEG bug rounds out a growing menagerie of vulnerabilities in code that
displays image files. Mozilla developers last month patched the open-source
browser against a critical hole discovered in a widely-deployed library for
processing PNG images. And last July, Microsoft simultaneously fixed two
image display holes in Internet Explorer: one made users potentially
vulnerable to maliciously-crafted BMP images, the second to corrupt GIF
files. The GIF bug had been publicly disclosed 11 months earlier.

There was a time when the idea of a malicious image file was absurd enough
to be the topic of an April Fools joke. One early and widely-circulated hoax
message dating from 1994 warned users of a computer virus infecting the
comment field of JPEG files.

"It was someone saying that just looking at a JPEG on your screen can get
you a virus," recalls Rob Rosenberg, editor of the debunking site
Vmyths.com. "In '94 it was a myth, but in '04 it's the real thing... We've
got the JPEG of death now."