editorial

Editorial

Winning the War on Information Security

The war between the Code Makers and the Code Breakers might be a 21st Century phenomena, but in truth it has been going on for many centuries…since man first wrote down his thoughts in words or pictures, he has sought ways to keep them secret from his enemies whose aim was to decipher.

But in the post-industrial information age with its focus on the speed of communicating personal and business thoughts, keeping an exponential information stream secure is a major task…one that many organisations are failing miserably.

While it is understandable that the sheer volume of data seems uncontrollable – Google started in 1997 with 4 computers sifting 26 million pages, but today it is estimated to need over 450,000 servers to index and handle billions of queries a day – it is critical that information such as business and finance, public infrastructure and government and defence communications are free from prying eyes.

In deciding what to secure many organisations believe they are taking an acceptable risk in transmitting information “in the clear” between data centres, branch offices, even when communicating with their banks. They base this risk on the belief that any potential thief needs to know exactly when and where in the wide area network critical data would be communicated. But recent breaches involving multi-million dollar losses in this region, prove that where there are risk takers, there are well-funded, tech savvy criminals with the means and the mindset to steal millions in seconds. These man-in-the-middle attacks, as they have become known, could be eliminated if the communications were encrypted.

Using 256-bit AES encryption provides protection that is computationally uncrackable – it would take a brute force attacker so much time, I can’t even begin to pronounce it: 3,671,743,063,080,802,746,815,416,825,491,118,336,290,905,145,409,708 years. And he would have to be trying a billion billion (101018) combinations every second for that period to exhaust all possibilities in a Senetas CypherNet encryption key. While Senetas offers today’s customers the futureproof security of our world-first Cerberis Gigabit Quantum encryption technology, which will protect data even with the advent of Quantum Computers, the simple truth is, that today’s technology remains uncrackable and businesses could avoid the cost and the embarrassment of a breach of corporate security and the loss of information or electronic funds.

According to research company Gartner in July last year, it costs as little as $6 per customer account to encrypt all data, but the cleanup costs after a breach amount to more than $90 per customer.

Senetas CypherNet is plug and play encryption that provides an unsurpassed level of protection – this technology is used to secure US Department of Defense networks around the world – and peace of mind, that critical information is safe to transmit 24x7.

John DuBois, CEO Senetas