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Salt Typhoon, Worst Telecom Hack in U.S. History: Why Cybersecurity Must Evolve to Prevent Catastrophic Loss

Our entire economy, our ability to get food and water, our ability to get energy to stay warm, and our livelihoods are dependent on our digital infrastructure. What happens when these incursions turn into full fledge war?

Our entire economy, our ability to get food and water, our ability to get energy to stay warm, and our livelihoods are dependent on our digital infrastructure. What happens when these incursions turn into full fledge war?

Yet, no matter how much money gets spent on cybersecurity, there is so much attack surface that small vulnerabilities can lead to massive loss. We call this asymmetric risk. We have to be perfect and expend massive resources to do so, while the attackers just have to find the right hole using a small amount of resources.

All of this will continue and get worse and worse until we reduce this asymmetric risk.

At Craxel, our contribution to mitigating this crisis, which in a war will become life and death, is two fundamental technology breakthroughs.

The first, our O(1) multidimensional hash allows real-time observability and connecting the dots at the many petabyte scale needed by U.S. gov't and telecoms to quickly detect penetrations and prevent damage. If you think legacy O(N) technology has any chance, we'll happily walk you through the math and physics. O(N) data analytics isn't fast enough or affordable at these scales, yet people keep pushing that growing data boulder up a hill. In 100 years, hopefully all school age children will understand algorithm complexity at least at a basic level - but we need our decision makers to understand it now. The solution to the U.S. government's data problems and not just in cyber is O(1).

The second, our high performance searchable encryption and zero trust capabilities offer a way to reduce the gain that an attacker can achieve when they do find a vulnerability. Our approach uses strong cryptography and the encryption keys are never in the data layer, so if the data layer gets breached, the attacker also has to steal the encryption keys from somewhere else.

Finally, secure by design is great and all software developers should try to reduce attack surface, but there is so much legacy code running that isn't going to change for a long time. Just look at the operating systems in use today. While we work to improve software, we need #1 and #2 above. Of course, Craxel's Black Forest is 100% built in a memory safe language and is secure by design.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/21/salt-typhoon-china-hack-telecom/