Volume 2025, Issue 1 (2025) Quarter Four

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Cyberbiosecurity Quarterly. As editors, we are proud to present this new platform dedicated to advancing research, dialogue, and policy in the emerging field of cyberbiosecurity. Cyberbiosecurity is a discipline at the nexus of biological science and cybersecurity.

Cyberbiosecurity Quarterly is responding to a need for a journalized communication platform identified at the Cyberbiosecurity Summit in Maryland, February 2025. At that meeting, leaders from across government, academia, and industry expressed a shared concern: critical infrastructures in the life sciences are becoming increasingly digitized, yet the knowledge needed to secure them remains fragmented across disciplines and poorly disseminated. The consensus was clear; there is an urgent need for sustained, peer-reviewed, and community-informed dialogue to shape both best practices and policy.

We are seeing the consequences of that gap in real time. Laboratory systems are being targeted by ransomware. Biological data is exfiltrated and resold on black markets. Synthetic biology platforms are vulnerable to code injection and supply chain compromise. Institutions lack frameworks to assess and mitigate digital risk in their biological research environments. These challenges are not hypothetical; they are unfolding now, and they demand coordinated responses.

We believe that a dedicated, open-access journal can help bridge this divide. Cyberbiosecurity Quarterly is designed to be more than just a publication: it is a commons for those who build, manage, secure, and study the digital infrastructure of biology. Through case studies, original research, software notes, policy analysis, and editorials, we aim to curate and elevate work that makes our bioeconomy more resilient.

This first issue showcases the breadth of this field and the depth of work already underway. We are grateful to our contributors and reviewers for laying the groundwork. But this is just the beginning. The future of cyberbiosecurity depends on a wide community of contributors: biologists, computer scientists, engineers, ethicists, legal scholars, and security professionals, each bringing their expertise to a shared table.

We invite you to join us. Submit your work. Suggest a theme. Start a conversation. Together, we can build a safer, smarter, and more secure foundation, for the future of the bioeconomy.

Whitney Zatzkin, Editor
David Molik, Editor