Yahoo has announced it is to encrypt all communications and information flowing into the internet company’s data centres around the world.
Following news that the National Security Agency had been hacking into the communications lines of the data centers run by Yahoo and Google to intercept information, Yahoo has now said it plans to have all data encrypted by the end of March 2014.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote in a Monday post on the company’s Tumblr blog, acknowledging the reports about the US government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, which she said it has never given permission for.
“There is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy. To that end, we recently announced that we will make Yahoo Mail even more secure by introducing https (SSL – Secure Sockets Layer) encryption with a 2048-bit key across our network by January 8th 2014. Today we are announcing that we will extend that effort across all Yahoo products.
“More specifically this means we will: encrypt all information that moves between our data centres by the end of Q1 2014; offer users an option to encrypt all data flow to/from Yahoo by the end of Q1 2014; and work closely with our international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are https-enabled.”
Paul Ayers vice president EMEA at Vormetric told IT Security Guru: “It is a shame in some ways that it takes an incident like this to recognise that technology like encryption needs to be utilised at all points of the data lifecycle, but companies need to realise that data needs to be protected both in transit and at rest.”
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