Quantum computers need just 10,000 qubits — not the millions we assumed — to break the world's most secure encryption algorithms

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Quantum computers don't need to be nearly as powerful as we thought to break the world's most secure encryption algorithms, scientists warn.

New research claims that quantum computers can make widely used cryptographic security systems obsolete with far fewer quantum bits, or qubits, than scientists have widely predicted ‪—‬ leaving sensitive data, like banking information and private messages, thought to be protected by encryption, open to interception.