Amazon announced today that it has acquired Wickr, a company with “the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology.”
Wickr was founded back in 2012 by a group of security experts and privacy advocates. It offers secure messaging, including text, photos, videos, and file attachments across Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows platforms.
The company’s reputation for security comes from a combination of 256-bit authenticated end-to-end encryption, with encryption happening locally on each user’s device. Every message sent uses a new random key for encryption, which Wickr claims “would take trillions of years” to break. This forms a zero trust platform, and Wickr’s own servers can’t even leak any communications. Add to that multi-factor authentication, message revoking, screenshot detection, and the ability to autodelete messages based on the time they were sent and/or the time they were read, and you can see why its list of customers includes the Department of Defense.
Stephen Schmidt, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for AWS, reassures existing Wickr customers and partners that they can continue to use Wickr’s services uninterrupted. It’s also clear that Amazon sees this acquisition aiding it in convincing more enterprises and government agencies to select AWS for future contracts. If AWS can offer the best secure communications solution available, that’s hard to compete with.
Wickr posted a message on its website regarding the acquisition, stating, “We are pleased to share that Wickr has been acquired by Amazon and is now part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team. We’re proud to have created highly trusted, secure communication solutions for messaging, video conferencing, file sharing, and more. From our founding ten years ago, we have grown to serve organizations across a wide range of industries, all over the world. Together with AWS, we look forward to taking our solutions to the next level for our customers and partners.”
