Hackers Breach Border Patrol System and Leak Traveler Data, Kodak Offers Solution

Although the exact details on the total number of photos leaked have not yet been revealed, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 pictures of people in their vehicles have been compromised. The data breach is said to be limited to a single land entry border port that also has not yet been named.

Border Protection Data Breach

To make things worse, a report from a separate UK-based news agency, The Register, indicates that the breached data and pictures might be available to download for free on various dark web onion sites. This means that the data could be in the hands of potentially thousands of people by now. The company mentioned in The Register’s data breach report is a Tennessee-based ID verification company named Perceptics LLC. The subcontractor was apparently breached after transferring copies of the images, which also violates CBP policies. This is not the first time that CBP data has been compromised. In the past, it was found that drug cartels crossing the US-Mexican border had been regularly hacking into CBP border patrol drones and surveillance systems, allowing them to smuggle drugs into the U.S. undetected. As an increasing number of government systems and critical tech infrastructure gets interconnected with newer IoT systems, 80 percent of experts say that a catastrophic data breach is almost certain to occur by 2021. Luckily, to avoid similar situations in the future, governments and corporations can rely on the security of blockchain technology to keep data safe from prying eyes.

Kodak to the Rescue

One such example of suitable blockchain technology comes from Kodak, which recently developed and launched a Blockchain-enabled Document Management System. The newly launched SaaS platform ‘Kodak Services for Business‘ aims to market itself to businesses and governments, offering them a secure and reliable way to store and access sensitive data. Beyond the obvious security advantages that blockchain systems offer, they can also greatly reduce the operating costs related to storing, retrieving, and securely deleting this data. This would allow even smaller businesses to benefit from the technology. According to Kodak, the implementation of its solution would yield as much as a 40 percent savings in costs and could potentially attract government agencies to adopt the tech. How do you think wide scale data breaches could be solved? Is blockchain technology a viable option? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!