Latest Maryland Cybersecurity Attack Could Usher In the State’s Need for a Blockchain Governance System

Recently, the Maryland Department of Labor released a statement announcing that due to a certain security flaw in their native database ecosystem, they “might” have accidentally released the personal information of more than 78,000 people living within the state’s borders.

Not only that, the agency then went on to reveal that the above-stated breach had taken place earlier this year when nine of its employees fell victim to a phishing attack

As a result of all these unwanted developments, Maryland’s Department of IT launched an immediate investigation into the case. In this regard, a cybersecurity expert involved with incident, claimed that the leaked information had been stored on a legacy database that comprised of data such as:

• Names of various individuals.
• Their social security and phone numbers
• Residential addresses.

Also, it is worth mentioning that a government official assured local citizens that none of their stolen data had been ‘downloaded onto an external drive’. However, anybody with even a little knowledge of such things knows that the information in question is now ‘heavily compromised’.

Last but not least, the state has offered the victims of this theft with a free “2 year credit monitoring service’.

1/2 @OregonDHS is mailing notices to about 645,000 clients notifying them that their personal information was compromised during a previously announced January 2019 data breach get more @ https://t.co/eTZJhr0h1B

— Oregon DHS (@OregonDHS) June 18, 2019

So Where Does Blockchain Technology Factor into All of This?

As many of our regular readers may already be aware of, hacking incidents such as the one mentioned above have increased in number over the past couple of years. This is because government agencies, more often than not, tend to rely on centralized servers that are non auditable and quite easy to penetrate.

Thus, many experts are now starting to turn towards blockchain governance platforms so as to avoid such issues from taking place.

For example, by making use of smart contracts, the possibility of a database being compromised becomes almost negligible. Not only that, it is virtually impossible for a miscreant — no matter how technically skilled he/she maybe — to hack into a blockchain ecosystem and obtain any data contained in it. This is because the information stored within a blockchain is decentralized and does not make use of a third-party organization for its maintenance.

Other Key Data Worth Pointing Out

As things stand, a number of American agencies have started to make use of decentralized ledgers to increase the security of their data pools. In this regard, it is worth pointing out that a few months back, NASA released a study in which it explored the use of blockchain within areas such as air traffic management, authentication, and privacy.

Over the past 12 months or so, a number of companies based in China, the Isle of Man and Estonia have been playing around with blockchain-based technologies.

Many experts are of the opinion that as we move into the future, blockchain technology will eliminate issues related to third-party security breaches completely.