Quantum computers are not just a possible future threat to today’s encryption. Their software, cloud access, circuits, and hardware can also present cybersecurity risks now. A July 2024 report previewed research into those attack surfaces—but it did not report a confirmed breach of IBM, IonQ, or another named provider.
What the 2024 report actually said
On July 22, 2024, Jeffrey Schwartz reported in Dark Reading on “From Weapon to Target: Quantum Computers Paradox,” a session scheduled for Black Hat USA on August 8, 2024. The session was presented by Adrian Colesa, then a senior security researcher at Bitdefender, and Sorin Bolos, co-founder of Transilvania Quantum. The report said Transilvania Quantum focused on quantum-computing systems, including those from IBM and IonQ, and development kits such as Qiskit; Bitdefender examined classical attack paths and exposure through cloud services.
The article described research areas and attack categories, not a provider-wide vulnerability disclosure. It does not establish that IBM, IonQ, or any other named company suffered a breach, nor that every discussed attack was successfully demonstrated against production systems. Its enduring point is narrower and useful: the systems around a quantum processor can be security targets even when the processor itself is not directly compromised.
How can hackers attack a quantum computer?
Bolos posed the underlying question in the report: “How about quantum computers themselves? How secure are they? How would you attack them?” The article grouped the risks into four broad categories. These are ways to frame an attack surface, not a severity ranking or a list of confirmed exploitable flaws.
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| Attack path | Example discussed | Security concern | Main control points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classical environment | Compromise a user system used to access quantum services | Unauthorized access, stolen data, or misuse of a job submission | Customer endpoint security and identity controls |
| Software supply chain | Compromise an SDK or alter a circuit before it is submitted | Computation integrity and potentially confidentiality | SDK publisher, customer build pipeline, and review process |
| Quantum processor | Manipulate qubits or the quantum processing unit, including unwanted interactions | Computation integrity or service availability | Quantum hardware and service provider |
| Cloud service | Attack the hosted service used to access a quantum computer | Access, job integrity, or service availability | Cloud and quantum service operators, plus customer identity controls |
| Cryptographic data | Target data protected with RSA encryption | Confidentiality | Data owners and cryptography or migration teams |
The report also discussed prompt injection as an examined risk. It did not provide comparative rates, severity scores, or independently validated defenses for these categories. The practical distinction is that some paths are conventional security problems—such as a compromised laptop or cloud account—while others concern the integrity and behavior of quantum hardware or submitted circuits.
Why the software and circuit path matters
Users commonly interact with quantum systems through development software and a service interface. That creates opportunities for an attacker to interfere before a job reaches the quantum processor: a compromised user machine could expose credentials or change a workload, while tampered development software or a modified circuit could cause a computation different from the one its author intended.
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Colesa’s advice, as quoted by Dark Reading, was to check “if the software development kit (SDK) is coming from a trusted source” and whether a “transpiled” circuit—the quantum equivalent of a compiled circuit—is exactly what should be sent to the computer. In practice, provenance and integrity checks belong at separate stages:
- Obtain SDKs from their trusted publisher and protect the systems and credentials used to install or update them.
- Review and preserve the intended circuit through the build and transpilation process.
- Compare the circuit submitted to a service with the expected output of that pipeline, rather than assuming that a successful submission means the intended workload was run.
- Restrict cloud account access and monitor use of quantum services as part of ordinary identity and endpoint security.
These are sensible checks against the paths described in the report; they should not be mistaken for a complete security standard or a guarantee that a particular service is secure.
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Where error correction fits—and where it does not
Bolos discussed errors that may arise naturally from the environment as well as errors that could be introduced maliciously, and described error correction as important in the context of malicious users. This connects reliability and security: unwanted interference can affect the result of a computation, not just whether a system stays online.
Quantum error correction is not, by itself, a complete cybersecurity control. It does not replace trusted software, secure accounts, circuit integrity checks, or protection of the infrastructure that hosts and operates a quantum service. The 2024 report’s framing is a reminder that security and computational reliability can intersect, not evidence that error correction alone blocks cyberattacks.
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Quantum attacks on encryption are a separate issue
The phrase “quantum threat” often refers to future quantum computers’ potential effect on cryptography. NIST describes quantum information science as an area combining quantum physics and information theory, and says its post-quantum cryptography work aims to safeguard information from future quantum computers that could break codes widely used today to encrypt data. See NIST’s quantum information science overview.
That cryptographic migration is related to, but distinct from, hardening quantum-computing infrastructure. The 2024 report included attacks on RSA-encrypted data among its categories, but it does not establish a date when a quantum computer will be able to break RSA or quantify that risk. An industry-consortium overview from the Quantum Economic Development Consortium distinguishes public-key schemes such as RSA and ECC from symmetric encryption: Shor’s algorithm is relevant to factoring and discrete-log problems used by public-key cryptography, while Grover’s algorithm has a different effect on symmetric-key security. For current standards and migration decisions, consult NIST rather than treating a general overview as a cryptographic recommendation.
People and process are part of the attack surface
Technical controls depend on people choosing, configuring, and operating them correctly. A related April 26, 2024 article from The Cyber Defense Review and the U.S. Army Cyber Institute at West Point argues that human factors should be considered in designing, engineering, and implementing quantum technologies. Its point applies beyond quantum hardware: rushed updates, weak account practices, or insufficient review can undermine controls at the user, software, and service layers.
The security lesson is not that quantum computing is uniquely unsafe. It is that a new kind of processor does not remove familiar risks in endpoints, software supply chains, cloud services, and operational processes—and may add specialized integrity concerns that providers and customers must address together.
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