Blockchain Cybersecurity: Why Businesses Can’t Ignore Blockchain As A Security Solution

A few months ago, Lloyd’s of London estimated the global cost of a “serious” cyber-attack at more than £92bn. Since then, that warning has been amplified by news reports of troubling and costly hacks on multinational corporations such as Tesco, British Airways, Facebook and even the United Kingdom’s governing Conservative Party.

There is little doubt that public servants take threats to cybersecurity seriously. After all, government IT systems are as vulnerable to an attack as anyone else’s – as we witnessed in last year’s WannaCry ransomware attack when National Health Service computers were put out of action.

So what are governments doing about it?

It doesn’t really matter. Whatever legislation they may be considering or implementing, without blockchain it won’t be enough to combat the risks posed to organisations and individuals by criminal attacks and data leaks.

According to recent data from the National Cyber Security Centre, the UK alone has experienced 1,600 cyber attacks over the past two years. Our data is handled, and potentially mishandled, by multiple web services every day. And we can expect more of the same – because the traditional web platforms on which everything from banks to social media companies operate on are fundamentally insecure.

Blockchain technology is already re-tooling our digital infrastructure – and it’s constantly being refined and improved. Much of its utility lies not in tokens, but in solving actual, tangible problems posed to individuals, companies and networks by threats from password phishing, impersonation, software bugs and more.

Businesses and governments that adopt blockchain have the opportunity to reduce their risks and liabilities almost outright. Those that don’t stand to be held criminally negligent.

Here are some of the key ways in which we can anticipate emerging tech solutions mitigation and reducing costs for organisations.

Blockchain cybersecurity: A security solution for businesses

As blockchain technology develops, businesses should be looking to implement three fundamental layers of tech solutions to negate cyber attacks.

The first is integrating technology such as the EOSIO open-source blockchain protocol into operations and moving responsibility for authentication and authorisation processes to users themselves. If we all have private keys to authorise transactions, banks and other organisations won’t have access to them.

The second layer involves moving to even more secure authorisation with hardware keys. Thirdly, companies can adopt more standardised interfaces for requesting consent so that users don’t accidentally authorise malicious actions.

Let’s consider how a combination of blockchain and hardware keys might thwart hacks in the context of Twitter. First, by only allowing tweets signed by a hardware key – that’s an easily-protected, secure key that can’t be copied or stolen – to be posted, it would be virtually impossible for any bug or corrupt Twitter employee to enable a fake tweet. – Verdict