Cybersecurity in a Brave New World
The average cost of cybercrime for a financial services organisation in 2019 was US$18.50 Million and US$17.84 Million for a Utilities firm – a greater than 50% increase from the previous year.
Vigilant Cybersecurity is now the order of the day and many organisations are developing novel approaches. However, many Cybersecurity initiatives are poorly conceived, bespoke concepts which are expensive, inefficient, and lacking interoperability between applications, networks, and platforms.
The nation-wide lockdown has made us realise how dependent and vulnerable we actually are, while we work at home, exchanging sensitive information and value, taking it for granted that the electricity supply and digital communications are always 100% reliable and secure.
Today’s imperative is an interoperable platform with global reach in which adaptive state-of-the-art Cybersecurity is simply out-of-the-box and built into the very fabric of the network - where stealing identities, hacking into accounts and interrupting other people’s services become something of the past.
The new 3rd generation of DLT-Blockchain is ideally suited to play this role. A good example of this is the Hedera Hashgraph(2) DLT network where Cybersecurity features come out-of-the-box and can be programmed into your special applications at low cost and without sacrificing performance or efficiency. These include:
- Decentralised Governance: No matter where in the world you are or how small you are, the network will always maintain your interests fairly
- Fairness of transactions with guaranteed finality: Whether it’s an online purchase, auction or gaming, there will never be any argument about fairness of outcomes among the participants with results being assured to be true and final
- asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT): There is no question about others interfering with the truth or validity of your messages or transactions
- Stability: Information you rely on will always be there and be fully traceable
- Privacy: You can safely interact with anyone (or any machine) in a completely trusted and tamperproof relationship without exposing your personal details.
- Interoperability:: Cybersecurity across the Blockchain-DLT space can only be maintained along physical and commercial supply chains if there is adequate interoperability between participating networks. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently identified the lack of interoperability among Blockchain-DLT networks as very evident. Nevertheless, Hedera Hashgraph and Microsoft have been recognized as being at the forefront of Blockchain-DLT interoperability advancement.
In the rapidly evolving energy sector, the UK government sees Cybersecurity as an extremely high priority issue.
Power Transition harnesses all aspects of DLT Cybersecurity provided by Hedera Hashgraph in its Energy Sector Decentralised Applications (Dapps) as a standard best practice.
Jiro Olcott, CTO, Power Transition Ltd
References:
- https://securityboulevard.com/2019/11/10-statistics-that-summarize-the-state-of-cybersecurity-in-financial-services/
- https://www.hedera.com/whitepaper
- https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2020/04/160011-blockchain-interoperability-world-economic-forum-releases-paper-explaining-importance-of-effective-communication-between-dlt-networks/
- https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/about-us/ofgem-data-and-cyber-security
- https://es.catapult.org.uk/news/energy-data-taskforce-makes-five-key-recommendations/
- https://powertransition.energy/
- https://www.hederacoe.com/
