Yahoo to Begin Encrypting Data Center Flow Early Next Year

Following the multi-company security breach by the National Security Agency just a few weeks ago, web company Yahoo is stepping up its encryption game. Like its long-time competitor Google, Yahoo announced this morning its plans to begin encrypting all data flow between its multi-continental data centers starting in Q1 of 2014.

The announcement was made by the company’s CEO Marissa Mayer, who clarified that though there have been reports of the US government accessing user data, Yahoo itself has “never given access” to “the NSA or any other government agency. Ever.”

Regarding specifics, the company plans to ship a 2048-bit key SSL encryption on Yahoo Mail data as early as January 8, 2014. Yahoo plans to wrap an encryption around all of the data that travels between customers and Yahoo’s data centers by the end of Q1 2014.

Yahoo says it will collaborate with all of its global mail partners to guarantee that, at the very least, the basic HTTPS protocol is enabled.

Google is also hard at work on more securely encrypting its private data and that of its users, though few specific details have emerged. We do know that most of the changes have been swiftly approved at the company and are being quickly put into place.

This whole fiasco emerged from the NSA break-in that occurred just a few short weeks ago. The program for enacting these breaches is called MUSCULAR, and is part of a system that targeted the privately-stored information of three of the web’s largest companies: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

You can learn more about it in our original report.