Helping Fortune 1,000 companies communicate in a crisis
2017 was a watershed moment for Fortune 1,000 companies like TNT, Maersk and Mondelez International when the NotPetya ransomware attack compromised their IT infrastructure and significantly impacted their quarterly and annual revenues.
Today, we’re announcing Wire Red, the secure way for large enterprises to communicate in a crisis when their IT infrastructure and network is compromised, partially or completely offline.
If infrastructure including email, phones and conference systems becomes unavailable, large businesses are rightly concerned that they will be unable to communicate with staff, customers, partners, media, and the financial markets.
Wire Red provides businesses with a pre-provisioned cloud-based communication solution with distinct groups for executives, investor relations, operations, and communications. The solution is fully secured with end-to-end encryption that protects all messages, conference calls and shared files.
It even includes secure guest rooms to securely communicate with external parties without them having to download or install anything.
Taking on the “shadow IT”
The bring-your-own-device or BYOD movement was a great way for organizations to provide more freedom for their staff when it came to choosing the devices they prefer to work with.
Personal messaging apps are no solution for corporate crisis communication.
“If a cyber attack compromises an organization’s network, staff typically resort to consumer messengers for crisis resolution, running the operations and investor communication. The organization loses control over who’s talking to who, or what level of security these solutions offer.” — Morten Brøgger, CEO, Wire
Consumer solutions like WhatsApp or Skype don’t give the organization the tools and control to ensure that the right people are in the right channels and no unwanted third parties are present. Depending on the solution, sensitive information and documents become available to service providers with questionable security practices and privacy rules.
Your network goes down. What’s your gameplan?
Traditional crisis communication software solutions have two shortcomings. They often run on premise and none offer the security of end-to-end encryption.
In a NotPetya-style scenario with the IT network offline, organizations need to be able to pick up their uncompromised devices (most often work or personal mobile phones), switch to different service like Wire Red, and carry on.
It might not be quite “business as usual”, but a cloud-based service with pre-provisioned accounts and groups in place allows staff to deal with the crisis, and continue to serve the customers.
No single point of weakness
The end-to-end encryption that is built into Wire Red means that there is no single point of weakness. Compromising the server does not provide access to the conversation content — neither messages, conference calls, nor shared files. Each message is encrypted with a unique key, which strengthnes the security further.
“Wire is cloud-based and independent from vulnerable corporate networks and all communication is end-to-end encrypted. There’s no central point of weakness, as every device encrypts messages, files and calls with a unique key that is constantly changing and not known to Wire servers. This provides perfect protection for any sensitive business discussions.” — Alan Duric, CTO/COO, Wire
In comparison, most other business communication solutions use only transport layer security (TLS) to encrypt communication in transit, but leaving conversation content vulnerable on the server.
With Wire Red, we are providing large organizations with an end-to-end encrypted, open source and independently audited crisis management platform.
As sophisticated cyber attacks that disable internal networks become commonplace, Wire is stepping up to help enterprise customers with a secure solution to conduct emergency communications.
