Cryptocurrencies on the Blockchain is Vulnerable to Attacks, but not “Data”

The blockchain technology is being used to protect data from being tampered. Even though the data serves an important component of most businesses today, yet ensuring that data remains safe, secure, private and authentic has become a real challenge.

John Zanni, President of the Acronis Foundation says, “We believe that blockchain technology will be transformative in the tech and IT sector in the coming years, similar to what the internet did for the world back in the 90s and early 2000s… We started a few years ago working with the Ethereum blockchain to see how to better protect data. Today, part of our storage and backup software lets users notarize any digital data and put that fingerprint on the blockchain to ensure it can’t be tampered with.”

Equifax cybersecurity breach can better illustrate the severity of the impact when data gets compromised. The breach occurred in September 2017 compromising sensitive information like personal data and credit card credentials of at least half the U.S. population.

Data tampering is also one of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity that businesses face these days. “Authenticity of data is actually one of the most important factors when it comes to cyber protection. Data can always be changed and modified… Blockchain technology can be used so that data can be signed with a digital signature. That digital signature, called hash, can then be stored on either a public or private blockchain ledger, which is highly immutable, making it possible to check if data was modified at any given time,” said the CEO and Founder of Acronis, Serguei Beloussov in an interview.

Blockchain technology, when it comes to handling humungous data volume, can be looked at as a distributed database that maintains the growing list of data transaction records. The distributed nature of this technology helps prevent tampering and data revisions because every transaction on this network is transparent and recorded in all participating ledgers. There is no ‘one official copy’ and timestamps to records make the data remain authentic.

Acronis applies blockchain technology to encrypt the data input files producing an output file containing hash – the product of a hashing algorithm. The hash acts as a digital fingerprint that gets modified every time the data it protects is tampered with. The hashing algorithm works one way, and hence it is impossible to determine the original input file from the output file alone.

“… Blockchain technology today focuses mainly on cryptocurrency and Fintech… the world needs to look beyond that… on how businesses and individuals can take advantage of this technology. The day someone figures out how small businesses can apply blockchain technology in a multitude of applications is the day it will really flourish,” says Zanni.