What Everyone Must Know About BLOCKCHAIN
With the digitization capturing the market at an unprecedented rate, the cybercrimes follow the trend. Be it any sector-Healthcare, Banking, Retail etc, we can see the effect of this information age explosion, no data is safe data.
There have been many cybersecurity protocols, but the demand for a more reliable protocol has always been on the hit list. Industries are implementing new technologies to secure their network and blockchain cybersecurity protocol can be one such solution to this menace.
A blockchain was first used as a public distributed ledger for bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions. As the name suggests, blockchain technology stores the transactions in blocks which are linked to form a chain. It is a type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), in which the blocks are linked using cryptography. The distributed storage of the data gives almost no scope for the hackers to access the information.
Each block contains its cryptographic hash, previous block cryptographic hash as well as the timestamp of recent transactions. As each block contains a reference to the previous block, they relatively form a chain. Transactions are recorded in the blocks and as they grow so does the blockchain. Also, once the blockchain transactions are recorded, it can’t be modified or deleted without altering the subsequent blocks.
There are mainly two types of Blockchains-Public & Private however, there are other variations available as well such as Hybrid and Consortium Blockchain.
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In case of Public blockchain, no permission is required. It is a public network as people from all over the world can become a node on this blockchain network. You simply need to sign in on a blockchain platform to become an authorized user on that blockchain network which gives you access to the transactions and do proof-of-work. The larger the network, greater the distribution of records and harder it is for hackers to hack the entire network The most common public blockchains are Bitcoin and Litecoin blockchains.
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Here, as we have large number of nodes, the transactions per second is low and the more we try to increase the size of blockchain, it will further slow down the transaction speed.
Private blockchains are a restricted network as they need a central Identity and Access Management (IAM) system for functioning properly. Only the authorized members on the blockchain network can access the confidential information monitored by the network administrator. Any new user needs to get permission from the network administrator to become a part of this private blockchain. An organization can choose the size of the private blockchain as per their need and it is pretty scalable. The limited number of nodes or participants results in the transactions occurring at greater speed however, there is greater risk of security breach as compared to public blockchain.
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Blockchain technology gives better privacy, transparency, data integrity and cost saving along with the decentralised approach of data storage making it less susceptible to the hackers. While this technology is mainly confined to its use in recording and storing transactions related to cryptocurrency, but its application is being explored in other areas as well like payment processing, digital IDs, data sharing, healthcare, real estate etc.
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