Tax Tip of the Week | QUANTUM: 2 1/2 Minutes vs. 10,000 Years

The last week of October, 2019 I attended our CPAConnect National Roundtable conference in Memphis, Tennessee. One of our nationally known speakers was Randy Johnston. He is an IT specialist who has assisted our three (3) letter federal agencies both recently and over the years. Part of Randy’s program included Google’s announcement that their quantum computer has solved a math problem in 2 ½ minutes that would have taken 10,000 years to solve. He went on to explain that this speed would make passwords and block chain security useless, and that passwords were headed out anyway being too easy to hack. Also, today’s viruses upon entering your computer, first encrypts your back-ups including those on the cloud and then encrypts your computer. So, only your offline back-ups may be of any value. He is suggesting that we return to the “days of old” in terms of offline back-ups that we take back and forth to our home or another safe location. We can no longer rely only on cloud back-ups.

However, multi-factor authentication seems to still be working at this time – so at least there is some good news.

                                By Mark Bradstreet

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–until next week.