In a new study that will be presented next week at the 26th USENIX Security Symposium in Vancouver, University of Washington researchers analyzed the security practices of common, open-source DNA processing programs and found that they were, in general, lacking. That means all that super-sensitive information those programs are processing is potentially vulnerable to hackers. If you think social security fraud is bad, imagine someone hacking your genetic code.

“You can imagine someone altering the DNA at a crime scene, or making it unreadable. Or an attacker stealing data or modifying it in a certain way to make it seem like someone has a disease someone doesn’t actually have,” Peter Ney, a co-author of the peer-reviewed study and Ph.D. student at the school’s Computer Security and Privacy Research Lab, told Gizmodo.

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