Recent revelations that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting people’s private communication – including calls, e-mails, text messages and other forms of communication –without a legal warrant, has brought the issue of online security into the spotlight.
Imagine waking up in the morning to find that all the information you have been sending to colleagues, clients or partners has been accessed by someone else, a spy agency at that.
In the technology-savvy world we now find ourselves, it is almost impossible to avoid passing sensitive information using most of the devices we have at our disposal, including e-mails, texts and phone calls.
But if the NSA does not need a court ordered warrant to intercept your personal communication, how can you protect your sensitive information from being leaked or intercepted without your knowledge?
A South African company that builds software security solutions, iSolv Technologies (iSolv), has come up with a revolutionary way to help secure your sensitive communication from being intercepted.
iSolv Technologies CEO, Jayesh Nana, said: “Organisations all over the world have grown accustomed to using VPN technology for securing e-mail communication. But with the increasing use of mobile devices for communicating, iSolv has identified the need for a secure communication product for mobile devices – SecCom.”
SecCom offers military-grade encryption for all your mobile communications, including voice calls and text messaging.
This means the chances of having your sensitive information intercepted are greatly reduced because SecCom offers end-to-end encryption, while most commercial encryption systems decrypt your information while passing through intermediate hops. This information is then re-encrypted and sent to the other recipient.
However, SecCom offers end-to-end encryption, which means at no stage in the process of forwarding sensitive information will the information be decrypted.
This gives companies the peace of mind that comes with knowing your sensitive information will only be decrypted once it arrives at its intended recipient.
The added security benefit of using SecCom is that the server hardware infrastructure through which all communication passes is provided to the end-customer, whereas other service providers only offer hosted services whereby foreign governments or spy agencies may have access to intercept communication data.
It is not only telecommunications companies that require this service.
Judging by the article mentioned below, it seems the need for a product like SecCom is important now more than ever.
The German media reported this month that US intelligence agencies began monitoring the mobile phone of the German chancellor more than 10 years ago, when Gerhard Schröder was leader.
This comes after current chancellor, Angela Merkel, accused the NSA of tapping her phone last year.
But US President Barack Obama has denied that the NSA was spying on Merkel.
If foreign governments like Germany fear they may have been intercepted without their knowledge, what are the chances of something like this happening to African governments and companies?
Nana added: “iSolv’s offering is a one-of-a-kind solution, which utilises public key infrastructure technology through iSolv’s award-winning TrustFactory PKI product suite.”
PKI enables the management of user identities and their encryption keys on a scale that covers the security needs of communities consisting of a few hundreds of thousands and even millions of users. This is achieved without compromising, in any way, on the level of security offered by PKI. It simply makes sense to implement PKI for large-scale secure communication solutions like SecCom.
Just recently, local technology Web site MyBroadband reported that as much as 60% of South Africa’s telecommunications routes have been intercepted by the NSA at the cable-level.
According to the Web site, a “Sniffmap” from Priority One Security (P1 sec) showed that 153 of the 255 telecommunications routes in South Africa may be intercepted.
But this news has been met with silence, so far, from telecommunications companies including Seacom, Neotel, Telkom and others, as they are yet to respond to queries from the Web site regarding the matter.
These two media reports show just how important it has become for companies, governments and individuals to make sure all their communication is secure.
SecCom was developed to try and safeguard your valuable information in order for you to continue worrying about more important things, like growing your business, while we ensure that your sensitive information is safe from the prying eyes of spy agencies.
For more information on SecCom and our other iSolv products, please contact Nilesh Jivraj on [email protected] or call us on 011 880 6103.