INFOGRAPHIC: Will cybercrime make the internet safer?

Many people look at the world as a zero sum game. When one person wins, it’s because someone else had to lose. The same principles are often applied to infosecurity. If you are winning at infosecurity, it is because someone else is losing. Cybercrime is so rampant – and both expensive and difficult to combat – that many information security professionals believe the situation is completely hopeless. Indeed, building infrastructure with the need to keep hackers out seems to be a fruitless strategy. But what if cybercrime eventually leads us to a better way?

The Problem Of Cybercrime

Hackers can spend very little time infiltrating an organization, and that breach can often lead to millions of dollars worth of serious damage. Some experts say that cybercrime is leading to the largest transfer of wealth in human history. In 2011, LulzSec hackers cost the Playstation network $171 million and shut down the network for over a month. Even one momentary infiltration can cost years of damage.

Can Blockchain Help?

Thanks to the seriousness of hacking, people are starting to look into better ways to deal with the information that is stored online. One of these better options could be building a decentralized web using blockchain technology.

What does this mean? Rather than having large databases full of sensitive information that can be taken down with a click of a malicious email, it means that individuals would control their own personal information thanks to blockchain’s decentralized structure. Instead of hacking one database for millions of records, hackers would instead need to hack each individual separately to gain any useful information. It could spell an end to cybercrime as we know it.

Instead of believing that cybercrime is too big a problem for us to ever solve, we could instead think of it as showing us all the ways not to build the internet to begin with. Learn more about how cyber crime could make the Internet safer from this infographic!