Every digital transaction, whether a financial transfer, a medical record request, or a signed contract, travels across a long chain of interconnected devices and networks before reaching its destination. A single request may pass through a personal device, a wireless access point, an internet service provider, several backbone routers operated by different organizations, and ultimately a data center server, frequently replicated across multiple countries. Encryption is the mechanism that prevents each of these intermediate points from reading the data as it passes through, and for more than three decades, that mechanism has relied on mathematical problems considered practically unsolvable by conventional computers. Quantum computing challenges that assumption directly. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer would be capable of breaking many of the public-key key exchange and signature mechanisms that establish trust for today's internet traffic, putting recorded sessions and authenticated transactions at risk. While such a machine does not yet exist, well-resourced adversaries are already collecting and archiving encrypted data in anticipation of the day it does, a practice known as harvest now, decrypt later.