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AWS acquires Wickr

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#91

Post by distribot »

mataug wrote: post #87
surge wrote: post #3

Probably going to use it to replace Chime. Edit: For those that have never heard of it, its their own IM, that while publicly available, is mostly used internally for company communications, similar to Slack or Skype for Business. https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

Amazon internally uses Slack for chats, while Chime is mostly used for video conferencing. My guess would be that this could augment Chime, and position it to be a useful part of GovCloud offering from Amazon.

Unless this changed in the last year, this is incorrect. Everyone was pushed to Chime after it was released.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#92

Post by wolverine876 »

To give a sense of Wickr's direction (before the acquisition, at least):

Wickr as of 10/2020 "has created a federal advisory board that includes Matt Olsen, chief trust and security officer, Uber (former director of the National Counterterrorism Center); Vince Stewart, chief innovation and business intelligence officer of Ankura (a former deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director); Jan Tighe, former deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence; and Joanne Isham, former deputy director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency."

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-...

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#93

Post by vmception »

I don't trust Wickr solely because it is closed source and a US team

The government contracts don’t give me confidence in their technology, it gives me the impression they sell snake oil to “security conscious” organizations just like that article says. Its like worded specifically to avoid any liability in the eventual lawsuit where people complain that it didn't offer what they expected.

The AWS acquisition gives me even less confidence.

The standard for less skepticism for me is distributed end to end encryption where handshakes are done between the specific parties communicating

This is common (but often ignored) knowledge on darknet forums and markets, where Wickr also doesnt have a good client for darknet operating systems - further pointing to it having an intended purpose of not offering privacy by not prioritizing it for Whonix and Tails

Most of the literature about this trepidation and solutions are not on clearnet but you can get a glimpse of sentiment in comment replies here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wi...

The rest of the literature would be on Tor onion services like Dread, or forums in existing or defunct darknet marketplaces

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#94

Post by Exmoor »

distribot wrote: post #91
mataug wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon internally uses Slack for chats, while Chime is mostly used for video conferencing. My guess would be that this could augment Chime, and position it to be a useful part of GovCloud offering from Amazon.

Unless this changed in the last year, this is incorrect. Everyone was pushed to Chime after it was released.

Amazon rolled out Slack in summer 2020.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#95

Post by Spivak »

manquer wrote: post #30
p0rkbelly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS uses Slack Internally.

Lol. Slack uses Chime SDK for voice/video calls [1]. That is partly why Amazon uses Slack in the first place. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280829/slack-amazon-aws-...

Which is amazing because Slack calls are so bad that they pushed us to pay for Zoom licensing. It can bring a brand new $2k laptop to a sputtering halt. Which is bad but honestly fine for meetings. Where it lost us was that we couldn’t use it for pair/group work because our tools would become so slow as to be unusable.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#96

Post by staticassertion »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #80
knaik94 wrote: post #24

I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure…

Having implemented HIPAA compliant software, the technical requirements arent very difficult. If you're following developments beat practices, you have 99% of technical requirements covered. The challenge with HIPAA is building process and documentation that demonstrates compliance. It's particularly challenging at the edges of your engineering org where people tend to use tools that abstract the technical details.

This is the case with all compliance, as far as my experience has shown. The technical controls are far second to the documentation and story telling.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#97

Post by staticassertion »

arpinum wrote: post #74
LordDragonfang wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you were interested in hardening your system and evaluating attack surfaces, that is also what you would do.

Great! invite someone into the building who has lied to the entire crypto community to undermine global security. They will surely know how to spot bad actors! Invite a bad actor into the building in order to keep bad actors out. Invite bad actor into the building? Hmm, maybe not.

You've just described a decades-long strategy of the strongest information security teams, which has turned into the industry of red teaming.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#100

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

wkrthrow wrote: post #79
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though true, this is just about entirely irrelevant given where Wickr has gone since 2016. It may surprise you to learn that Wickr was awarded a large US Airforce contract last year. [0] [0] https://wickr.com/wickr-awarded-us-air-force-contract/

Why is it irrelevant post-2016? Wickr was still a preferred choice of drug dealers well up to 2018 (and probably beyond). I know this because I was using it to communicate with them.

Sure, there's a subset of DarkNetMarket dealers who use Wickr. There's a subset of all sorts of underground/niche communities out there using it.

You get purchased by Amazon after securing a military contract, not by being an awesome way for online drug vendors to chat with customers. Though perhaps that's what got them the US Air Force contract to begin with...

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