In the last few years, there is a ‘trend’ in which hackers gain access to personal information through the phenomenon of phishing. This is leading to serious consequences as mainly the elderly fall for the technique. There are countless examples in which people lose tens of thousands of euros by clicking on one link only.
Nowadays, the government is actively trying to prevent such occasions from happening. They try to inform people through advertisements in all sorts of media. However, this is only prevention from the back end. The problem needs to be tackled from the front end by taking on the criminals themselves. But how could this prevented? Blockchain is the answer. To my opinion, this is the technique to prevent phishing. As you might know, this technology is a ‘distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called blocks.’ This means that every record of a user of the internet could be tracked and stored in the database.
How this would work is that this network would increase traceability, meaning that every step in the system could be traced back. Nowadays it is hard to trace back a person because the internet lacks transparency these days. Implementing blockchain in the system would increase this traceability and thus transparency. With the technique, the original criminal could be traced and get the appropriate punishment. Next to that, extra consequences could be taken to prevent phishing, for example blocking the IP address of the criminal. This would mean that the network would increase its safety once more and in the end protect the elderly (and other digital illiterates).
