Could blockchain solve the threat of ransomware?

Ian Smith, CEO and Founder, Gospel Technology: 

Imagine a world where many systems are operating all around us, enhancing our lives both passively and interactively. Where technology is rapidly pivoting away from proprietary, siloed systems to more open and connected architectures. This is happening both in business infrastructure and consumer technology services – and indeed there is convergence and overlap in them.

We see new ways of living and working: traditionally separate functions becoming increasingly fuzzy and digitally controlled by the individual. The connected, digital world has allowed this – and we will see more of it as new generations become increasingly aware of the way they see the structure of their lives.

To enable this digital lifestyle, there is a huge volume of data produced, transferred and consumed. The more frictionless and elegant the technology solution, the more data is handled in the background – and the more valuable this data becomes. In some ways – people and services are ahead of what the current generation architectures allow – and we see human nature triumphing over the limitations of existing architectures. Workarounds to transfer data and gain consent have been enabled through legacy and insecure data transfer techniques such as email, spreadsheets and consumer cloud storage. These are ripe for exploitation and are common sources of data modification accidents as well as malicious actions that result in major data breaches.

We at Gospel believe that security in this digital world is long overdue. No longer can we accept manual and legacy workarounds to share data. Data control, security, privacy and, importantly, user consent must be applied and managed in a decentralised way. This removes the intermediary brand that is currently required to define trust. A system is needed that builds trust into every transaction. Where trust is defined through absolute verified identity and data access is treated as an exception (allowed through decentralised data logic), as opposed to an open permission-based system.

This type of system would accelerate enterprise collaboration; saving money and improving digital services for a number of industry verticals (varying from professional services and HR to construction and manufacturing) that rely on sharing and exploiting personally- and commercially- sensitive data. Where data can be shared outside of the traditional perimeter with complete control and transparency. A system that uses a distributed consensus and security measures that are essentially unbreakable using contemporary computing capabilities.

We have built that system. We call it Gospel. You can subscribe to it as a cloud service, or deploy the software in a flexible enterprise-owned environment. It is a game-changing blockchain-based cloud platform that enables businesses to share and collaborate on data both internally and externally with absolute trust and security, making data breaches a thing of the past.