Everything that is connected to a network or temporarily attached to external storage can be cracked.
Even Iranian uranium enrichment plants via tainted USB sticks.
Much of today's applied encryption and access control only relies on the inability or rather impracticality of prime factorisation of a product of big enough relative primes.
This must be an affront to any self-respecting pure mathematician.
What would happen if someone came along with an algorithm to solve this or simply with sufficient computing power for a successful brute force attack within a feasible time?
So far most reported attacks seem to concentrate on the latter.
The intriguing question seems to be whether a code breaker of the first kind would promulgate his findings and raise his reputation, or if he clandestinely would exploit his knowledge to raise his material wealth?
