[ad_1]
From time to time, a great piece of news is interrupted that reaffirms the reason why blockchain technology exists and why (despite the current market sentiment) solutions like Bitcoin are the future. The recent hack of Quora and Marriott are a perfect example.
On 3 December it was reported that a data breach on the Quora's most popular questions and answers platform had exposed 100 million users' personal information. The founder, Adam D & Angelo, claimed to have discovered "unauthorized access to one of our systems by malicious third parties" on Friday.
As is usually the case, the company alerted the authorities and stated that they were "working quickly to investigate further the situation and take appropriate measures to prevent such incidents in the future".
Just a week ago, it was reported that Marriott Hotels was also the victim of a hack that led to the theft of personal data from as many as 500 million customers of its Starwood hotels. This incident puts Marriot in second place on the respectable list of the biggest hacks of all time (Yahoo is driving with 3 billion user data exposed, while Quora is in 10th place).
Investigators are now speculating that Chinese hackers are behind the Marriott data breach, and as for Quora, the assailants have not yet been identified.
What these two incidents underline are the apparent vulnerabilities to which centralized databases are exposed. A centralized database has a single point of failure, which means that no matter how robust the security protocols are, all it needs is a single interruption to compromise the entire structure.
And here comes The Blockchain
Blockchains, on the other hand, are decentralized, which means that data is stored on a distributed network of computers without a single point of failure.
"What makes Blockchain hack proof the millions of Blockchain users makes it difficult for anyone to corrupt the network, each block has a timestamp and a link to the previous block that forms a chronological chain reinforced through cryptography, ensuring that others can not alter the records. "Source
For a hacker to take over the Bitcoin blockchain, for example, he would have to overwhelm the entire network in what is known as a "51% attack".
It is an attack in which an attacker acquires more than 51% of the hash rate of a network, which allows him to interrupt his normal operation. However, attacking the network is very expensive.
According to FreedomNode, "To successfully launch a 51% attack, the attacker would need more than 478,400 hardware units that cost about $ 1,004,669,000. To power the attack, you would have to pay about $ 1,578,000 in electricity every day ( including cooling) "
The more expensive it is, the more secure the blockchain network is, because it deters most hackers from trying to attack it. For this reason, Bitcoin's blockchain is highly protected and has never been hacked (at the time of this writing).
Companies like Quora and Marriott should consider developing private Blockchains where their data can be stored on a distributed network of authorized computer nodes. These nodes would have specific access privileges to prevent all company data from being accessible to everyone. At the same time, decentralization will make it much harder to attack because it would require a hacker to overwhelm all the nodes of the computer at once, which would be much more expensive than it is worth.
CryptoPotato video channel
More news for you:
Of Ali Raza / 6 December 2018
Of Yuval Gov / 6 December 2018
By Jonathan Goldman 5 December 2018
By Toju Ometoruwa 5 December 2018
Of Ali Raza 5 December 2018
By Yoni Berger / 4 December 2018
By Yoni Berger / 4 December 2018
Of Ali Raza / 4 December 2018
Of Yuval Gov / 4 December 2018
Of Yuval Gov 3 December 2018
Of Ali Raza 3 December 2018
By Toju Ometoruwa 3 December 2018
Of Yuval Gov 3 December 2018
Of Ali Raza 3 December 2018
By Jonathan Goldman 2 December 2018
Of Yuval Gov 2 December 2018
Of Summer Hirst 2 December 2018
By Benjamin Vitáris 2 December 2018
By Toju Ometoruwa / 1 December 2018
By Toju Ometoruwa / 30 November 2018
[ad_2]Source link
