Yahoo has announced through a blog post that all the traffic between its data centres is now full encrypted, as a part of an ongoing project under which it intends to deploy encryption technologies across its services.
“Traffic moving between Yahoo data centers is fully encrypted as of March 31”, announced Alex Stamos, Chief Information Security Officer, Yahoo in a blog post.
Stamos also revealed that that encryption will be applicable to any activity that happens within the Yahoo homepage and most of Yahoo properties.
“Users can initiate an encrypted session for Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and Good Morning America on Yahoo (gma.yahoo.com) by typing “https” before the site URL in their web browser”, added Stamos
Last October, Edward Snowden, blew the whistle on NSA secretively tapping fiber optic cables of companies like Yahoo and Google. This move of encrypting data centers is a fulfillment of the promise that Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, made to take measures to protect their users’ privacy after the US surveillance disclosures last year.
In addition to this it was also revealed that GCHQ, a British surveillance agency, had captured web cam images of almost 1.8 million users of Yahoo Messenger last February.
Mayer wrote at the time, “Our fight to protect our users and their data is an on-going and critical effort. We will continue to work hard to deploy the best possible technology to combat attacks and surveillance that violate our users’ privacy.”
Yahoo’s email service was encrypted in January earlier this year.
Stamos also revealed that “A new, encrypted, version of Yahoo Messenger will be deployed in coming months.”
