"Their paper considers a broad view of the legal definition of hacking under the CFAA, applying it even to previous work done by one of the co-authors, Yoshi Kohno. Kohno’s research, which coded DNA to hack a DNA sequencing machine could be viewed as hacking under the law, says co-author Ryan Calo.
“[DNA hacking] still meets the idea of hacking that dates back to the 1980s, but this stuff about compromising a system by tricking it seems like a paradigm shift,” Calo says."