To battle hackers, IBM wants to encrypt the world

IBM said that it has achieved a breakthrough in security technology that will allow every business, from banks to retailers to travel-booking companies, to encrypt their customer data on a massive scale — turning most, if not all, of their digital information into gibberish that is illegible to thieves with its new mainframe.

“The last generation of mainframes did encryption very well and very fast, but not in bulk,” said Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM's mainframe business. Mauri estimates that only 4 percent of data stolen since 2013 was ever encrypted. As the number of data breaches affecting US entities steadily grows — resulting in the leakage every year of millions of people's personal information — IBM argues that universal encryption could be the answer to what has become an epidemic of hacking.