AWS Has Acquired Encrypted Messaging Service Wickr

Amazon's cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. From a report: The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr -- a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only "collaboration service" that meets security criteria set out by the NSA. AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, "effective immediately," notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news. Financial terms were not disclosed in the short announcement. Wickr had raised just under $60 million in funding according to PitchBook data (it also notes a valuation of under $30 million but that seems to be a very old estimate).

Monopoly...

[Tulsa_Time]

by Milton Bradley

Wckr - Wankr Re:Monopoly...

[harvey the nerd]

Wankr might be a better descriptive brand name.

Amazon can afford it

[The Evil Atheist]

Surely Amazon can afford to put the "e"s back into words.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Jeff Bezos will be invited to their "Wickr Man" offsite.

Re:

[Ostracus]

At least make it rhyme. Wickr === snicker.

Typo

[slashmydots]

The headline is supposed to say "AWS Has Acquired FORMERLY Encrypted Messaging Service Wickr "

Signal

[lazarus]

I used Wickr for well over 5 years, but have since switched to Signal. With the exception of the ability to lock the screen on their desktop apps, Signal has all of the security features of Wickr and you can also look at the code [github.com]. If I were still a Wickr user I think I would be worried about AWS weakening the back-end security to enable data collection.

Re:

[Entrope]

Amazon runs a highly classified cloud platform for the US intelligence community. (The DoD's JEDI contact was supposed to be the less-classified version of that, until it ran into its well-documented contract award issues.). I am pretty sure Amazon will keep a full strength version at least for those customers.

Signal is definitely a good platform to consider for any such use.

Re:

[pauljlucas]

Signal has all of the security features of Wickr and you can also look at the code.

Unless you compile the app yourself from source, you have no guarantee that the pre-compiled binary version of the app you downloaded was compiled from that source.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Nah.

https://signal.org/blog/reprod... [signal.org]

Re:

[pauljlucas]

But now you have to trust their Docker image and compiler. You have read this [cmu.edu], right?

Re:

[sharial77]

By this point in the internet's history, most of us have come to terms with the fact that accessing the web involves giving up information about ourselves every time we visit a website. Mozilla thinks we can do better, and so it's launching Rally, a data-sharing platform and plugin the company claims is the first-of-its-kind in the browser space. With Rally, Mozilla says it hopes to make a case for an equitable market for https://mythdhr.club/ [mythdhr.club] data, "one where every party is treated fairly" and "where peopl