InfoGuard, a Swiss leader in high-performance encryption solutions has announced a dramatic increase in sales of its hardware based encryption solutions following surveillance and eavesdropping scandals involving the NSA (National Security Agency) and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters).
“Our sales of encryption technologies are pretty stable, especially as our devices typically have a life span of many years,” explains Thomas Meier, CEO of InfoGuard, “In the past, our customers have tended to be banks and financial institutions that are keenly aware of threats caused by eavesdropping attacks against networks. However, sales data for the last quarter shows wins from technology and industrial market leaders across other sectors that in the past may have overlooked encryption as irrelevant but are now waking up to the idea that state sponsored cyber surveillance is a real threat to national and international links.”
Meier estimates that sales compared to the same period in 2012 have increased by over 20% and around half of customers have mentioned issues like PRISM as a contributing factor. “We have customers from other industries that are asking for advice on how to protect their R&D, production, and business data and by proving the existence of governmental surveillance programs, the media has provided the security market with an economic growth stimulus,” says Meier.
The other factor Meier believes is contributing to increased demand for encryption is data security breach notification regulations including two new legislative proposals that under consideration by the European Commission. The first, which has drawn the most attention, was the European Commission’s proposal of a new regulation to replace the current Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. If adopted, this Regulation would introduce a general obligation for all data controllers, across business sectors, to notify the regulator in case of a breach without undue delay, and not later than 24 hours after having become aware of it.
“There is a growing consensus that a breach of the physical communication network where all the data was encrypted would not require notification as the data is effectively unreadable,” says Meier, “As well as serving best practice, encryption is increasingly becoming a requirement is industry specific regulations such as banking and healthcare and in combination with issues like PRISM, we expect sales to increase throughout 2013 and 2014.”
Corporate espionage is real, and both optical networks and any other communication links on public property are threatened by attacks. Secret services have to be counted among the most advanced attackers, having the best financial, legal and technical means to breach security measures. In recognition of the issue, organisations like NATO routinely encrypt all traffic and even whistle-blower Edward Snowden repeatedly emphasized that strong encryption is an effective protection against data theft: “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on"
Based in Switzerland, InfoGuard is an independent company that guarantees the highest security and quality implementation standards offering powerful data encryption up to AES 256 bit key length. AES encryption presents cyber criminals and hackers with an insurmountable obstacle that has been consistently proven by international crypto researcher to be effectively unbreakable. More and more major European organisations are following the Swiss bank code of best practice by encrypting data in flight with InfoGuard technology.
With a team of experienced cryptographers and security experts, InfoGuard’s R&D and production facilities for security relevant components are all based in Switzerland. Furthermore, InfoGuard’s security solutions use a proprietary, hardware-based random number generator generating new session keys at short intervals. All InfoGuard products are developed strictly in accordance with the FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 level 3 requirements in a dedicated ISO 9001:2000 environment in Switzerland.
