#WeekendWisdom 092 Encryption

Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 92. This week we’re going to talk about Encryption.

Where did this story start?

A few weeks ago, I was talking to some people about my favourite topic #Ransomware and I was explaining how ransomware goes through the process of encryption of all the data files that they can see. Somebody stopped me and asked me, what do I mean by encryption?

I was kinda surprised that the word wasn’t really better known out there, maybe its because of the industry I’m in.

What is Encryption?

Encryption at it’s most basic form is the scrambling of a set of data in conjunction with some kind of a key that will scramble the data make it unusable, you won’t understand what it is, unless you have the key which, whoever receives the data, they have the key, they can decrypt the data. Get it back to something that looks normal.

How does it work?

So what we talk about in the information security business:

1. you take plaintext, which is the stuff that you can read.
2. you apply the key to it, which generates ciphertext, which is what’s transmitted.
3. Anybody that gets the ciphertext, they won’t be able to understand it.
4. When it gets to the other side, the person uses the key and it decrypts the data and they get back to plaintext.

All very modern sounding.

This has been around for since ancient times. There was apparently some encryption found in some tomb in Egypt from like 1900 BC. So Encryption has been around a long time. It’s not just something new with computers.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.