Los Angeles — With the growing concern from prowling hackers, micro-blogging outfit Twitter is now becoming more security conscious and to boost its mobile security options, just announced the acquisition of “Whisper Systems”, a start-up company that develops software to improve security and privacy for smartphones and other mobile devices.
Now armed with its acquisition of Whisper Systems, Twitter gains technology to bolster security of its magnifying microblogging service and gets a pair of highly-respected experts in the field of online security, which is best known for its antivirus software for Google’s Android mobile operating system.
News of the purchase comes via the Whisper Systems blog.
“The Whisper Systems team is joining Twitter starting today,” Twitter said in a statement on Monday. “As part of our fast-growing engineering team, they will be bringing their technology and security expertise to Twitter’s products and services. We are happy to have Moxie and Stuart onboard.”
Twitter did not revealed the acquisition price and declined to comment beyond its statement.
Twitter, which professes more than 100 million active users, allows people to send short, 140-character, messages to groups of followers. The service has become a popular communications device for celebrities, politicians and businesses. It has also played a role in several geopolitical events, such as the past year’s uprisings in the middle east, by allowing dissidents to organize and communicate.
Whisper Systems was co-founded last year by security specialists Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. Besides, Marlinspike is held in high regard in the security community, having gained notoriety for discovering high-profile vulnerabilities in systems that encrypt data over the Internet and wifi networks.
Whisper Systems said its products will continue on, but they will be briefly unavailable as they are integrated with Twitter. Whisper Systems’ offerings include RedPhone, which provides call encryption for Android phones; it will be interrupted immediately. But Flashback, which provides encrypted backup for Android, will remain online for another month.
Also, the company did not mention WhisperMonitor, which offers a software firewall, or TextSecure, a more secure, drop-in replacement for text messages. Whisper Systems also offers WhisperCore, which provides full disk encryption as well as management tools for Android phones. It is free for individual users while enterprise customers pay for the software.
WhisperCore has a number of intelligent features designed to make up for security shortcomings in Android. For example, WhisperCore users can selectively revoke permissions that an app requests while allowing the user to still use the app.
Whisper Systems’ statement reads:
We started Whisper Systems with the goal of improving security and privacy for mobile devices. We were attracted to this not only because we saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the security solutions that never really worked in the PC environment to begin with, but also because the stakes are much higher–due to the nature of mobile devices themselves–and we did not like the way that things were looking.
We ended up tackling the full stack–all the way from application-level solutions at the top of the stack, down through a hardened version of Android, to kernel modifications at the bottom of the stack. Along the way we learned a lot, and developed products that we’re proud of.
Now that we are joining Twitter, we are looking forward to bringing our technology and our expertise into Twitter’s products and services.
Interestingly, there are some other Whisper Systems products that include text encryption, voice encryption, firewall software and encrypted backup. Apart from these, Whisper Systems software, all of which are in beta testing mode, “will live on,” the company says.
Twitter did not reply to a request for comment about its plans for the technologies. Apparently, Twitter will use the security expertise of Whisper Systems’ crew to bolster its own system, which has increasingly become the target of spammers and hackers.
In the meantime, Twitter users can protect themselves from malicious attacks with Bitdefender’s Safego app for Twitter, which analyzes followers and tweets to filter out the good from the bad.