Decrypted Data That Exposes Hackers

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As your company joins the ranks of other big corporations petrified over being held responsible for the next big data breach, it is enough of a concern to cause people to start rethinking how they collect, store, and make network data available even to company employees. It is no longer a good idea to even trust your in house team of IT professionals with highly sensitive network data, and outsourcing the IT work to a third party company is equally risky. To make matters worse, when a breach does happen, it is the company where the breach of sensitive data occurs that is held ultimately responsible for the actions of hackers and criminals, which may or may not even be associated with the company being taken advantage of by these hackers.

Who Can You Trust With Your Company’s Sensitive Data?

A level two background check can only tell a business so much about those it employs and puts in charge of managing the company’s sensitive data. To make matters worse, basic levels of encryption methods are often quickly rendered vulnerable to hackers very shortly after the public becomes aware of the existence of such newer encryption techniques. To out source the company data to a third party IT management company, such as a cloud computing firm, gives rise to a problem where many different companies being managed by the same cloud firm falling to a hacker’s efforts potentially exposes more than a single company’s sensitive data to the hacker in question.

Intelligent Decryption Solutions

Simply encrypting data has worked to slow down hackers in the past, but slowing down a hacker is no longer good enough. What is needed is data that is itself risky to use once decrypted. For example, imagine that you are a hacker that gets a hold of a list of credit card numbers, along with other relevant personal information, from a data breach you caused. Typically, this is bad news for the person whose credit card information and personal information just got stolen. But, what if your decryption efforts produced false results of millions of credit card numbers and related personal information. As a hacker, can you tell which credit card numbers and personal information is genuine and which is false? What if you use the credit cards, and they actually seem to work? What if using the false credit card information not only works, but starts tripping sensors all across the Internet, alerting agencies to the flow of data, all the while making it look like you are getting away with identity theft, when in reality you are just leading authorities to your point of operation? Such data is in a sense deceptive to data thieves, in that to use it exposes them to authorities giving them more insights about the hacker over time. In this respect, the use of deceptive data salting methods can be an excellent way to expose hackers–especially when they sell this false information to other data thieves, putting others than themselves at risk in the process.