Cybersecurity Service Aims to Secure Data Against AI, Quantum Threats

Professional services company Accenture is working with AI and quantum company SandboxAQ to help organizations protect sensitive data against current and future threats, including those posed by AI and quantum computers.

The companies plan to offer a new service to audit current cryptographic assets and identify where they can be improved to increase enterprise resilience and lower the impact of a cyberattack.

Accenture has introduced a new encryption risk assessment service, integrated with SandboxAQ’s AQtive Guard unified cryptography management tool. According to the partners, the service uncovers risks caused by weak cryptography before they impact critical data.

Accenture research found that more than half (52%) of CEOs consider the accelerated pace of technology innovation a top risk for cyberattacks. Cyber trust and resilience in emerging technologies like generative AI and quantum computing were deemed highly relevant by 86% of organizations.

“The prevalence of generative AI, as well as expected new global post-quantum encryption standards, makes data protection absolutely critical to safeguarding confidential business information and data used to train AI foundational models or used in AI applications,” said Accenture Security global lead Paolo Dal Cin.

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Dal Cin said malicious actors are stealing sensitive data now to decrypt later using future quantum computers that will be able to break current encryption methods. The new service is designed to expose potential risks to data and upgrade encryption to increase protection against ransomware and data theft and manipulation and prepare for future risks from quantum computing.

The service identifies risk areas including cryptographic assets such as digital certificates or cryptographic keys, and the use of symmetric or public key cryptographic algorithms throughout the enterprise.

SandboxAQ and Accenture could then give organizations prioritized recommendations for fixing these to protect against threats including those posed by post-quantum technology.

“As we help clients discover data that’s vulnerable to current and future attacks, there are many benefits from enhancing their cryptography defenses. The recent global outage from just one software update highlights the need to increase observability across the enterprise,” said SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary.