Waltham, MA – A nice town in Massachusetts. Some of you may have never heard of it and to others, it’s probably pretty inconsequential. Just another New England city full of snow and bad accents, right? Wrong. On so many levels.
Waltham, MA is the location of the main PornHub servers.
Think about that for a second. Just let it sink it. Think of your PornHub username and all the hours of videos attached to it. Think about how innocently your porn journey may have started on that very site and, how perverse it may have become at 2am in the darkest corners of your bedroom.
They must have some seriously powerful security though right? No chance that information could leak out, embarrassing thousands of people and ending marriages….righ...right guys and gals?
Recent Data Breaches
Well let’s talk about some other recent data breaches.
2017 – Equifax - “Equifax says a 2017 data breach exposed the sensitive personal information of 143 million Americans” (The Equifax Data Breach, 2017). Enough said there.
2016 – Yahoo - While the breaches actually happened in 2013 and 2014, in 2016 Yahoo finally admitted to data breaches. First they stated that the names, emails, birthdays, and telephone numbers of 500 Million users had been hacked. They later corrected this statement by stating all 3 Billion users had actually been compromised in some fashion, some including passwords and security questions (Armerding, 2018).
2016 – Adult Friend Finder - Adult Friend Finder took a stab at being the least secure company in 2016 as well. More than 412 Million users had their names, emails, and passwords exposed when 20 freaking years of data was leaked in hack (Armerding, 2018).
I’ll spare you the rest of the details but these go on and on and on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a total database security dolt. I do not know the first thing about it but, at this point, I have a hard time imagining any of my information is safe.
…And That is Why We Need Decentralization of Information
This is often lost in the Bitcoin drama. Many cases are made as to why we need decentralization of money and assets. Currently though, information is an asset. We cannot continue to trust a nerd in a hoody to use this information in a fair and moral way. Information should be kept decentralized, on a blockchain, spread across thousands of servers and encrypted in such a way so as not to invite exploitation and extortion.
It is very easy to get lost in the money grab mentality right now. Don’t get me wrong, I hope crypto makes me a freaking a millionaire and I hope it does the same for everyone with enough foresight to get in now. I also, however, think its important, for all in the space, to keep an eye on why this is important and what makes this space so damn exciting. If nothing else, it makes you feel better when the market dips!
References
Armerding, Taylor. (2018). The 17 biggest data breaches of the 21st century. CSO. Retrieved from https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/data-breach/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html
The Equifax Data Breach. (2017). Federal Trade Commission. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/equifax-data-breach