Many Sony Pictures employees probably wished their old emails would just disappear after a cyberattack exposed tens of thousands of messages.
Smartphone app developer Confide is using the hack to pitch big companies — in Hollywood and beyond — on technology designed to let people communicate without a trace.
The company’s year-old app, also called Confide, sends encrypted messages that automatically self-destruct like Snapchat images. Now the company is launching a new version for corporations and telling Hollywood it can keep their secrets from prying eyes.
Confide said it will take out an advertisement in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times to offer Confide for Business, as the corporate version is called, for free in perpetuity to Sony and other movie studios, television networks and music labels. The ad also addresses celebrities whose personal photos from their Apple iCloud accounts were posted on the Internet a few months ago.
The ad’s timing is auspicious, coming after weeks of embarrassing revelations from Sony Pictures stemming from the attack, first publicized in late November, that revealed thousands of private emails and documents copied from Sony’s computer systems. Publicity around the cyber theft has underscored the vulnerability of email and created an opportunity for firms to pitch alternatives to traditional corporate communications.
Two of Confide’s founders, Howard Lerman and Jon Brod, said they already had planned to release a corporate version, but they accelerated the launch after the Sony cyberattack. The hack “underscores the whole reason we made Confide,” said Lerman.
A number of services have sprung up to satisfy the desire to keep secrets among both businesses and the general public. Snapchat, which makes text messages and videos disappear seconds after being viewed, is hugely popular with teens. Messaging services like Wickr and Silent Circle were started by cybersecurity experts. The hunt for ways to ward off hackers and government snoops intensified after the disclosure last year of U.S. National Security Agency efforts to siphon data from phone calls and Internet messages.
Existing encrypted or ephemeral messaging services haven’t proven to be completely secure, though digital privacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation found some messaging tools observe security best practices.
“Assuming it’s bug-free, it’s a lot better than using email,” said Nick Sullivan, a security engineer with cybersecurity and network company CloudFlare. But, he added, “it is really hard to prove you have an encryption service that works.” Sullivan said he wasn’t familiar with Confide and was speaking generally about messaging services.
Like other communication services that tout their security bona fides, Confide encrypts messages without storing them on the company’s servers. Messages self-destruct as soon as recipients read them or reply. Users must swipe a finger over each word to reveal it, a measure designed to make it impossible to capture a screen image before a message disappears. Each word disappears again once the finger has passed over it.
Confide acknowledged the danger of appearing unseemly in pitching the corporate app in response to the Sony attack, which exposed thousands of Social Security numbers, home addresses, salaries and other sensitive information. “The intent is not to capitalize,” Lerman said. “We really hope Sony takes us up on our offer.”
Brod, a former AOL executive, said news of the hack brought a surge of Confide downloads as well as questions from curious business users. “We got a lot of incoming requests asking, ‘Can I use Confide for my company?’” Brod said.
Brod and Lerman said Confide for Business is set up like a corporate email system. The customer’s IT department can add to or remove users from a central address book. Companies can create group distribution lists as they do with email, but messages go back and forth only via the app. Confide charges a license fee for each Confide for Business user. Executives declined to disclose a dollar amount.
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blogs.wsj.com – 2014-12-23 14:37:08