On Dangers of Centralized Data Storage — Again
The European financial world is in tremors again. The leading Canadian Banks such as Bank of Montreal (BMO) and Simplii Financial — a subsidiarty of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) were cyber-attacked.
Intruders have gained access to personal data of the clients and are now holding it ransom for $1 million in cryptocurrency from each bank. The leaks contain information on more than 50,000 BMO clients and about 40,000 Simplii clients.
Hackers have already confirmed their intentions by releasing unencrypted names, social security numbers and answers to security questions of some clients. They have also told the world how they managed to hack into the system.
The banks administration is not in a rush to comply with the demands: “We stick by the principle of not paying ransom to criminals. We strive to protect our clients and help them”, said BMO representative Paul Gammal. However, CIBC vowed to return 100% of money to all Simplii clients if they happen to be affected by the consequences of private information leaks.
The situation where personal data of clients becomes available to a third party is not rare. This is why Casper API team continues developing the platform that allows to store data securely while keeping transactions transparent. Casper API uses smart contracts that make the interactions between clients and providers easier; P2P architecture to increase network reliability; zk-SNARK cryptography to allow confidentiality in dealing with data. We also provide SDK that allows to integrate any apps with our platform in a quick and convenient fashion.
Casper API also offers reserve data storage for additional reliability and safety. One more copy (of all files) is sent for storage to partner data centers and other large providers.
Centralized data storage will never be reliable since the data is kept in one place (company) and can be breached, as we have seen it happen time and time again.
