- Blockchains need a new level of protection against Ransomware.
- Storj has 13,000 storage nodes distributed globally.
- The blockchain storage system can protect critical data.
Recently, Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the epidemic of ransomware, hackers locking up data and making computer systems useless until they get paid a huge fee. Secret Service Assitant Director Jermy Sheridan has shared three reasons in his testimony. About why ransomware got so serious.
Accordingly, Jeremy Sheridan’s first reason is we must reduce the profitability of ransomware campaigns, subsequently the growth of cryptocurrencies as a form of extortion payment.
More so, Cryptocurrency, difficult to trace and it crosses borders with liveliness and because of that, it provides cybercriminals a safer way to do criminal activities and gets paid to stop the activities. Cryptocurrencies handmaidens, blockchains need a new level of protection against these criminal activities.
Even more, the discussion with many leaders in decentralized data storage as well as a security expert to discharge ways in which distributed storage from projects like Arweave, Filecoin, Skynet and Storj might stymie ransomware attacks.
Decentralized Storages
Maggi
Decentralized storage, Maggi noted, shifts the playing field. When data distributed or decentralized, it ends up in lots of places, but entities. Much decentralized architecture lists out lots of organizations in storing data. So attackers need to compromise multiple places with entirely different security protocols in many cases. So it is difficult for hackers to locking up data.
Even though, Maggi recognized, if there’s a vulnerability in the blockchain planning, that might be an attack point. Therefore, there is no perfect way of security. If blockchain storage crushes ransomware, inevitably criminals will find ways to use it and launch a new attack.
So Maggi mentioned a decentralized approach changes the game for the attackers in a sense because it’s not interesting for them to attack however each copy it’s too expensive.
Storj
The chief officer at Storj, John Gleeson, said that it now contains 13,000 storage nodes distributed globally, and each time anything stored it’s going to be in at least 80 various places.
Henceforth, the chief officer of Storj stated, “the blockchain decentralized aspect of it, that when you think about data. In the way it stored on decentralized networks, there also not a single thing that you could go and compromise and takedown with the ransomware attack, where the data, the availability or reliability of that data would impact”.
In the Storj network, the whole design built for trustlessness, which is an acceptance that makes it difficult for hackers. Holders in the Storj network don’t know what they are storing and can’t look at it. Without knowing anything, they just paid to store it and prove it availability, but only the legal user can decrypt it for use. It will be safer and it will make it difficult for attackers to attack.
Arweave
Arweave, a distributed storage system that provides permanent storage, even after the organization that paid to store it disappears. Arweave’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Williams explained that Arweave is a permanent hard drive.
Moreover, even if someone did manage to encrypt your local drive, they couldn’t be able to encrypt your Arweave records. If they encrypted one, you could just revert to the previous version because it’s write-only.
Sam Williams, said Arweave’s consumption far has largely been for users with sensitive data. The blockchain storage system can protect critical data, making it immutable and everyone can get periodic publicly verifiable proof of the data stored.
