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Why corporations have even more incentive to secure their data in the midst of international uncertainty and conflict

As our world becomes ever more interconnected through cloud infrastructure and global trade, disruption to targeted systems causes far reaching impact. Think, for example, of how disruptive the accidental outage of Facebook applications was a couple of weeks ago: An entire ecosystem of online applications, many of which leverage Facebook for single sign on, were inaccessible. Every business that counts on Facebook for their users to access a service was impacted.

The Facebook incident was apparently accidental. But this is essentially how denial of service attacks and other types of cyber crimes have a cascading impact beyond a given target.  In times of political unrest and uncertainty, these types of disruptions become more likely because cyber warfare seeks to create disruption in order to wreak havoc on the economy.

The Rand Corporation defines cyber warfare as “actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation’s computers or information networks through, for example, computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks.” In addition to explicit attacks, cyber warfare often manifests as tacit state support for other types of cyber crimes. It should come as no surprise that China and Russia are the largest source of attacks in cyberspace since 2006 and that the US and Europe are disproportionately targeted.

According to Cybersecurity Ventures, costs related to cybercrime will reach $10.5 trillion globally by 2025. Businesses will bear much of this cost, directly or indirectly. While businesses won’t eliminate the use of cloud services since the benefits are too great, they can take steps to shore up their digital infrastructure using new technology that serves to enhance the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of access points.

How blockchain can help

Distributed ledger technology creates a trust layer in digital infrastructure. The decentralized nature of the ledger allows all nodes to record transactions, passing along transactional data with high levels of both encryption and transparency. Data gets recorded in a “chain” of nodes, which eliminates single choke points hackers to exploit. Here are some key areas where blockchain — web 3.0 — will help business face the mounting prospect of increased cyber attacks and disruption in the coming years:

A Secure your Internet of Things

By decentralizing device authorities into a blockchain, businesses can ensure attacks are impossible to execute. Smart device access can be quarantined away from central systems by using blockchain integrated biometrics for access. This fundamental step can help prevent disruption related to ransomware attacks and denial-of-service.

Stop Ransomware Attacks

Use a public protocol index layer on a platform tied to a blockchain to stop ransomware attacks before they impact corporate systems. This is particularly impactful because many recent ransomware attacks in the US this past summer (think of the gas supply and the meat distribution) originated from geographies with incentive to disrupt the American economy — but the businesses bore the brunt of the recovery efforts and costs.

Mitigate DDoS Attacks

The Facebook incident this month was apparently accidental but attacks of this kind happened to Google in 2017, AWS in 2020, or GitHub in 2018. If DDoS lasts long enough or happens to a particularly essential system, it’s impact is costly and wide-reaching. Deploy public protocol and blockchain to distribute applications and data to protect systems from takedowns.

Replace Passwords

Let’s face it, passwords are problematic. Requirements have become increasingly complex by design and thus unfriendly to use. The result is that people reuse passwords across systems and business and personal devices. 2FA offers a poor solution, as it is — itself — often not user friendly. Leveraging blockchain for password management not only enhances your enterprise security infrastructure, it makes your employees happier and your business run more efficiently.

Analysts and thought leaders agree that the years ahead offer no comfort when it comes to mounting cyber warfare and its impact on economies and businesses. Fortunately, the distributed ledger and W3 offer some solutions uniquely equipped to mintage some of the impact.

Learn more about how we can help

HeraSoft’s next generation software offers a variety of products and services to improve enterprise logistics management and cybersecurity.

  • HeraVault™ offers distributed cloud storage with built-in replication, error correction and restoration capabilities.
  • HeraFlow™, is an AI-Powered threat analysis system for fast and accurate threat data monitoring perfect for high-volume workloads and enterprise-level SOC’s.
  • HeraPass™, with inherently fraud proof design, helps businesses innovate user management in IoT environments by achieving the anonymization and encryption of highly-sensitive data.

HeraStamp™ proof-stamps mission critical data to permanent data stores and can help with data integrity in, for example, ecommerce settings.