In the past few years, companies have become significantly more interdependent—users share passwords, and systems use backend technologies operated by third parties. So when hackers breach a company’s security, they often gain access to a wider set of services and information than initially expected.

Yesterday at 12:45pm central time, our ops team detected a dramatic spike in login requests to Basecamp. More than 30,000 login attempts were made in the hour that followed from a wide array of IP addresses. Our first line of defense was to block the offending addresses, but ultimately we needed to enable captcha to stop the attack.

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!