CARS GLOBALMAG September 2016 | Page 62

OVER 65 GB Race after race the teams collect information that spans from lap times to the ideal car setup to telemetry and engineering figures and this data becomes more and more valuable. And with information being shared faster and more widely than ever before, the possibility for the data to be compromised has also increase, because in a sport where one hundredth of a second can make a huge difference, this data can have an actual monetary value too. The cost of generating all this data from scratch can be loosely calculated by looking at the total number of test, race & set-up sessions and then adding together the total costs of all of these events since the team started racing. These are big numbers we are talking about here. Of course, this simple calculation merely includes the obvious team costs and there are many more costs that should be included too to get the true data value. In short, the number is only ever going to be higher than we all initially think. But it’s not just a concern for high-profile race teams either. Small teams that have been racing for many years have vast data sets that can also run well into the multi-millions of dollars. And hackers know this, which is why they are starting to turn their attention to motorsport teams using Ransomware. Ransomware is a type of malware that uses encryption to lock data owners out of their digital files until they pay a monetary ransom for a ‘key’. Essentially it works by getting into an