“Q-Day” isn’t just another scary apocalyptic term. Always looking ahead, quantum computer advancements will accelerate all tech innovations. This means all encrypted data in the past that has been stored by bad actors will be cracked open.
For those in charge of your organization’s future, you can’t help see AI is changing things fast, it’s accelerating innovation and that includes quantum computing. All that “safe” encrypted data that’s been sucked up and stored over the years by countless bad actors will one day likely be cracked.
The fresher data will be most valuable but stale data will still be a treasure trove to bad actors sold on the dark web. Q Day is likely going to arrive and probably sooner than we think is possible. We will look back wherever our trusted encrypted data travelled and know that was the vulnerable vector and was always a compromised pipeline. Wifi, mobile, routers, cloud…
New rules and regulations won’t prevent those willing to break them from committing crimes with data. This means in the future there likely cannot be any real privacy except at established physical self-contained facilities. Those will likely be in or close proximity to data centers which will need unfathomable security precautions. You think enterprise SSL certificates are expensive, wait until they turn into literal physical security tunnels.
Right now we have to assume our data will be compromised in the future regardless where it’s currently stored because it likely got there across a compromised pipeline. In some ways since all of our data has to be accessed by a human somewhere, this has always been a risk we took but we assume and trust in an organization’s stewardship to keep our data safe.
Q Day means despite the trust in others, it will likely no longer matter. How are we all going to deal with this new reality?
Will it fall to our governments to treat data infrastructure as a high national security asset? Will we need better physical security and insist on only fiber to minimize data leaks? How will millions of miles of fiber be locked down?
After Q Day, will anything transmitted over the air or over a physically unsecured networks just be assumed to always be compromised regardless of encryption level?