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These days it seems like every government has a far-reaching and well-developed digital surveillance operation, complete with defense, international espionage, and offensive components. Smaller nations even join spy alliances to pool resources. But there are still many nation-states that for various reasons prefer not to handle their cyber intelligence development in-house. So they do what we all do when we need software: They buy it from a vendor.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).

The scariest hack of them all on the internet has been around for a long time, but it doesn't get a lot of attention in the broader tech press. It's BGP spoofing and it compromises the most basic functions of the internet: the routing of data from one system to another. Effective use of BGP spoofing is not within the reach of script kiddies, but there's a lot of it going on. How much? Nobody knows and nobody can know. It's possible to detect that an attack is going on, but it's impossible to prevent it and it may be difficult to stop an attack in progress.