Feds invest $675k to help keep Canadians safe from quantum threats

The federal government announced hundreds of thousands of dollars today to protect Canadians from hackers of the future. Experts say computers are becoming more and more powerful all the time, and the threat of devastating cyber attacks is growing with them. To prepare for the quantum threat, the federal government announced $675,000 for computer research and development at the University of Waterloo. Last month a computer hardware glitch hit Rogers, knocking out internet, wireless and cellphone service to customers. The cost to businesses alone was estimated at well over $100 million. Dr. Michele Mosca of the University of Waterloo says the Rogers outage could be a small-scale example of what could happen. “It would be much worse because the Rogers incident was inadvertent and kind of a random event but when you have adversaries and cyber attacks involved there’s active adversaries choosing to take down systems,” Mosca said. Mosca has been working on quantum computer technology at the University of Waterloo for decades. He says possibly within five years computers will be powerful enough that the danger from hackers could be overwhelming. Experts say the threat could come from just about anywhere such as nation states or well-funded criminals. They say it’s going to take years to prepare for something that doesn’t even exist now, but it has to be done.