They're system administrators, pen testers and CISOs they're not writing code (unless you count scripts written to break into a system). 'Our engineers are brilliant.' Unfortunately, even the brightest software developers are usually not security experts.

'But my company is different,' you might be thinking. Mistake #1: Assuming your developers are security experts In more cases than not, this crypto code is implemented incorrectly, leaving organizations with a false sense of security that only becomes evident once they get hacked and end up in the headlines. There has been an explosion of new healthcare, financial and government applications over the past few years resulting in more and more cryptography being added to backend applications. The answer is simple: almost everyone is doing encryption wrong. If terrorists can download an app from the app store that uses encryption to protect their chat messages from the NSA, why couldn't the US Office of Personnel Management, The Home Depot, Target, JPMorgan and Citi Bank (just to name a few) use the same encryption to protect their customer data from hackers? Why do these data breaches keep happening when unbreakable encryption is readily available? If encryption is so unbreakable, why do businesses and governments keep getting hacked? If the most powerful supercomputers in the world can't break the mathematical laws of encryption, how can the FBI, NSA and CIA decipher the terrorist communications they intercept?īut there's a flip-side to this question that rarely gets discussed:

Encryption has made itself famous lately by helping bad guys hide secrets from good guys.

Macbook encryption problems