G7 Executive Talk Series Branded Story / Rivetz
Cybersecurity: Success Within Reach
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s the G7 leaders gather to exchange ideas, how to protect democracy and their citizens from cyber attacks will certainly be a hot topic. Governments around the world need to protect national secrets while safeguarding the personal data of their vast workforces. For instance, the U.S. Department of Defense has 3.2 million employees – making it the largest employer in the world. When it comes to cybersecurity, there have been far more failures than successes to date. The U.S. government fell victim to the largest data breach in the country’s history not so long ago. The Office of Personnel Management is, more or less, the human resources department for the federal government, as they oversee the legal details of hiring, promotions, benefits and pensions for millions. The data breach began with the attackers stealing the agency’s master list of credentials: usernames and passwords. They used these credentials to access the system and implant malware to steal
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sensitive information. The attack compromised data from background checks on current, former and prospective federal employees. Information included applicants’ personal finances, past substance abuse, psychiatric care and other troublesome personal details. In addition, 4.2 million past and present employees’ personnel files were put at risk, along with 5.6 million images of employees’ fingerprints. The attack raised deep concerns about government security, and inflicted irreparable damage to agency’s reputation. Quite simply put, the present system of password security has failed. New, devicecentric solutions using the blockchain offer the greatest defense against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Perhaps the greatest vulnerability in the password-based system is the user, who often chooses weak passwords or re-uses them on multiple accounts. Probably the biggest reason is that we just don’t like passwords.
More than 80 percent of us would find it convenient if we never had to use passwords again, according to a Rivetz-commissioned survey of 1,000 U.S. adults. Even if we were better about our password creation and use, hackers still wouldn’t have too difficult a time overcoming that security layer. Many security firms are experimenting with blockchain solutions, but Rivetz has a holistic approach that offers tremendous promise. The company combines the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) already built into the hardware of billions of devices with the immutable record-keeping of blockchain technology to eliminate our reliance on usernames and passwords. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that employs a network of peers and cryptographic algorithms to ensure the ledger cannot be altered. Each transaction in the ledger is signed with a private key that gives the signer governance over that transaction, for whatever purpose.
