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Comment by johndunne | Hacker News Reader

I remember first hearing about this while working at a US firewall company. The scale and precision of the attack kept this virus in the minds of everyone who appreciated what it proved capable of and the scale of social engineering employed to effect it. It kind of ushered in state-on-state cyber warfare, or at least, brought the reality of weaponized viruses to the public conscience.

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A phenomenal piece of engineering and spycraft, this implant was the reason I wanted to apply for officer school at the airforce

Shortly after, the Snowden leaks would happen, which influenced my decision otherwise

Indeed. It's incredible how important software and networking has become for humanity. Alot of people still don't realise how risky having mobile devices that can sense (GPS/audio/video) on our person and the invisible combination of the zero-day is to our liberty and security.

Imagine if the same strategy were applied to biological warfare. Novel viruses tailored to be symptomatic and cause harm to just one specific world leader. If the technology exists, it could be the most formidable assassination tool available; a self-delivering, non-nuclear ace-in-the-hole for winning a war.

This concept is featured in The Dark Forest, the second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. It was something where you could genetically tag someone and then if they woke up 50 years later from a chrono sleep, various systems were preprogrammed to have "accidents" around them, like self driving cars, etc.

It's also in the (1998) Metal Gear Solid game, where the protagonist is the unknowing carrier of a virus deadly only to specific key people.

I was about to comment “hey, spoiler alert”, but then I realised that you’re talking about a game released a quarter of a century ago. More time has passed since MGS came out than passed between the Ramones’ first gig and MGS’s release. Mad.

It's also explorered in the plot of a Limitless (TV series) episode. There, it targets people that have the Khan marker in their DNA.

Unlikely this could ever be done. We share too much of the same firmware for something like to be possible. The average human genome has about 4-5 M single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - rate in the order of 1 SNP / 1000 bases. The rate is much lower in functionally important parts of the genome because those tend to be under evolutionary constraint / conservation.

...it is also the plot device of the latest bond movie...

Targeting a specific individual may not be possible, but targeting an ethnicity might be practical

There is a very interesting conference from Defcon 25 about this exact subject: https://youtu.be/HKQDSgBHPfY?si=N9C-5VRNMtIoCQBB

Thanks, this was interesting.

You don't have to imagine it, you can just play Metal Gear Solid!

It's probably not that imaginary. There was much hand ringing during COVID that Russia's testing protocol for meeting Putin would allow them to collect DNA from world leaders.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-kept-macron-dista...

And conversely, the article also mentions Putin’s social distancing, which could be a rational defensive measure against biological warfare that he believes might exist, rumors of an undisclosed serious health issue notwithstanding.

Corona ?

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