Colorado Looks to Adopt Blockchain Technology to Improve Data Security

A new bill in the state of Colorado is being introduced to the local Senate that proposes utilizing blockchain technology to help keep private data secure from the likes of cyber-attacks.

Analog to Blockchain

Legislators initially introduced the bill on January 16, 2018, and it suggests that if they implemented the use of a distributed ledger, there would be no reason to continue with paper records or to have people manually updating these data sets.

Therefore, the problems the state is currently experiencing when it comes to their current collection of data and issues related to retention would be solved, and the records would be kept more secure.

At current, Colorado citizens still have to pay a visit to the state agencies in the flesh if they want to make some modification to their information, which is another inconvenience that could be resolved by the use of a blockchain-based system.

Measuring Innovation and Attack Vectors

If this bill is successfully passed, this would mean that the Chief Information Security Officer in the state would have to complete an evaluation as to what the costs and benefits would be if the government systems turned to using distributed ledgers. The legislation would also spark an investigation into how much of an improvement could be seen compared to the traditional computer systems when related to preventing cyber-attacks.

The bill says that in 2017 alone there were in the region of six to eight million breach attempts every day into the digital platforms of the state government in Colorado.

A lot of the records that the government keep are unsecured which means that they are potentially lucrative targets for identity hackers and thieves. The bill also talked about how the number of attempts to rob personal information is always growing.

How this is achieved is becoming more and more sophisticated. Hackers are continually developing new techniques in which they can steal personal data for individuals or companies.

It could be as simple as clicking on a link that was sent to you via email or downloading a file that contained malware and gave malicious agents access to your computer.

The world of blockchain is not immune from these sorts of attacks, with a significant amount of initial coin offerings (ICOs) being affected by hackers.

In a lot of these cases, the contribution address where investors would send funds to for the ICO would be hacked and changed to that of the hackers. This obfuscation meant that both the investors were losing out as they would not receive the tokens they would otherwise have gotten, and the company with the ICO would not receive the funds.

There has been more caution as of late in the ICO world, and there are some solutions to these issues in the works.