Could Blockchain prevent us from a Ransomware Attack?

The recent topic of hustle and bustle was the ransomware attacks that happened all around the globe, a few weeks ago. The question that arises is- how to prevent these attacks with the increasing reach and utility of internet in an individual’s life? In the last few days I have heard a lot about blockchains and that “Blockchain cannot be hacked”. I wanted to learn more about blockchains and find out the authenticity of this statement.

What is blockchain?

The questions that arise in everyone’s mind are- What is a blockchain ? What is it which makes it considerable as a new world of internet ? Is it worth spending so much time and energy in understanding a concept which is known in different terms by different individual ? Everyone has a different perception about this technology. I have tried to answer all these questions in a simple, but bold manner.

Lets consider an example,

Where you(a “ system”) have an expense sheet of a company(your ” data”) which is to be monitored by different people at different locations which means they have the exact same file with them(“ blocks”). Now each block will have a link to the previous block and also, the timestamp of the data last entered.

If you update a transaction on your system, the system automatically sends an email to other systems and if you have enough resources(“ bitcoins”) to access them, the first system to capture that email will send a command that the transaction is completed and the data on all the blocks will be updated.

This process is driven by “blockchain” technology.

Thanks to Mike Bullock for making it so simple to understand this Idea.

This technology, which is considered as a new form of internet, is as disruptive as internet was considered 36 years back and we can all see where we are now with the same.

Block chain is a decentralised system which cannot be hacked and cannot be copied, but it is open to public. It omits the middle man while transacting with a third person, making the transaction faster and more secure.

Bitcoins are digital assets which can be used for different transactions instead of your real money. They are considered as virtual gold which can be used for any transaction, over the internet. They can be transferred directly from one person to another without having any middle man.

This is a simple concept behind this technology, which will help you understand about this strange looking word called Blockchain.

Mahindra group, one of India’s largest MNC which have their involvement in automotive, finance and IT sectors  joined hands with IBM to develop blockchain based supply chain management system. They could soon be known as one of the largest blockchain players in the world.

There is a lot to discuss about it but let’s not deviate from what our topic of discussion is and get back to the nuts and bolts of our topic.

What is Ransomware?

A recent cyber attack put the world in a shock. Everyone was talking about the ransomware attack that happened but a very few of them know exactly what a ransomware is. “It is a malicious program that blocks the user’s or the victim’s access to the files on their system by encrypting them and to access them again the victim has to pay a ransom amount”. If not paid then the information whether important or irrelevant will be lost forever and there is no other way to fetch the files back unless one has a backup of that data at some safe storage place.

The best example is the National Health Service in UK which faced this attack last month when WannaCry ransomware was gaining its popularity around the globe. Under this attack many patients couldn’t get proper treatments, newborn babies had to stay longer than usual in hospitals, ambulances were rerouted as their data could not be registered.

In what way blockchain would have helped during the ransomware attacks?

As I stated at the beginning of this post, the attacks over a month got me thinking.  Several factors contributed to the attack – business/IT models, legacy systems, leaked vulnerabilities.

Could blockchain possibly protect against future ransomware attacks?

After all, healthcare decisions and treatments are, at some level, a peer to peer transaction of value. Health records are one of the areas being seriously considered for blockchain.

For one thing, blockchain solutions are decentralized – which means that there wouldn’t be a single copy of the data that could be held to ransom. Data could be safely accessed from a range of privileged clients.

For another, blockchain is immutable. When data has been written to a blockchain no one, not even a system administrator, can change it. This provides benefits for audit.

As a provider of data you can prove that your data hasn’t been altered, and as a recipient of data you can be sure of the same.

Since the whole network immediately knows about any activity happening in the network, it is almost impossible for a hacker to steal data without raising an alert.

If we move further and seal our data with an input on the blockchain, for example biometrics, we might end up making the system more reliable and much more difficult to hack.

 There are some social and ethical questions around that too-around the management and trust of someone’s personal information. Digital mistakes can happen even without a cyber-attack.

It has another side as well, for instance the hackers responsible for WannaCry ransomware attack asked their victims to pay the ransom in the form of bitcoins, which made it almost impossible to track these hackers down. From the looks of it we can safely say that these hackers are exploiting the flaws of old technologies by using the future ones. If we had used the Blockchain technology, we could have avoided these attacks.

This study of blockchain technology made me look at our human transactions and data through a very different  perspective, or through a ‘value’ lens, if I may say so.