In what appears to be the first successful hack of a software program using DNA, researchers say malware they incorporated into a genetic molecule allowed them to take control of a computer used to analyze it.

The biological malware was created by scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle, who call it the first “DNA-based exploit of a computer system.”

To carry out the hack, researchers led by Tadayoshi Kohno (“see “Innovators Under 35, 2007”) and Luis Ceze encoded malicious software in a short stretch of DNA they purchased online. They then used it to gain “full control” over a computer that tried to process the genetic data after it was read by a DNA sequencing machine.

The researchers warn that hackers could one day use faked blood or spit samples to gain access to university computers, steal information from police forensics labs, or infect genome files shared by scientists.

For now, DNA malware doesn’t pose much of a security risk. The researchers admit that to pull off their intrusion, they created the “best possible” chances of success by disabling security features and even adding a vulnerability to a little-used bioinformatics program. Their paper appears here.

“Their exploit is basically unrealistic,” says Yaniv Erlich, a geneticist and programmer who is chief scientific officer of MyHeritage.com, a genealogy website.