The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.
Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.
Focus on security and privacy has been important for Wire from day one. Over the years we've taken numerous steps to strengthen our technology and sharpen our privacy-by-design approach to our product and business model. This is more relevant than ever with many starting to realize the destructive effects of weak security and lack of privacy on both day-to-day business operations, and our lives as people who trust our most intimate details to various online services.
Impacting as many as 500 million customers, Marriott’s data breach is one of the largest in history. While we don’t yet know the root cause of the breach (which impacts hotels within the Starwood Group and is believed to predate Marriott’s acquisition of the group); what surprised many people is just how long the door was left open for the attackers – four years in total!
The lack of end-to-end encryption in Skype has long been a concern for security conscious business users. However, in August 2018 Microsoft announced the availability of Private Conversations, offering users the ability to protect chats, calls and file sharing with end-to-end encryption built on the Signal protocol.
We’ve spoken about the importance of secure client communications before. From an accidental leak of information, to a malicious cyber-attack, compromising client confidentiality can result in the sort of reputation damage that can be hard to come back from. But while organizations understand this, too often we find employees defaulting back to less secure communication methods. Why? It comes down to two key factors.
Nowadays, the press doesn’t have to look too far for the next cyber attack story! Whether it’s the surprise theft of customer data, like British Airways suffered this year, or a fresh Facebook hack, if there’s one thing we’ve learned this year – no one, regardless of size and sophistication, is immune to attack.
Group conversations can get noisy – new ideas, status updates, answers to questions, the occasional joke. It can be easy to miss important info, or a question directed at you. The new mentions functionality highlights your name visually and makes it easy to scan the text and find the sections relevant to the reader. Searching for "@My Name" (replace it with your actual name, of course) returns all mentions of you giving everyone another way to search and filter the most important messages.
When Maersk, a global leader in shipping and logistics, was hit by the NotPetya ransomware attack in 2017, it not only found itself unable to manage day-to-day operations efficiently, but also unable to effectively inform the markets and its stakeholders of its response. Combined, the financial impact of NotPetya on Maersk is estimated to have exceeded USD$300m.
Whether it’s a malicious cyber attack, or a complete system outage; when disaster hits your network the immediate priority is to maintain business operations and resolve the issue. However, what you might not realize is that during this recovery period your business could be at even greater risk of a data breach, or malicious attempts to eavesdrop on your confidential discussions!
