Moving ahead with an announcement made late last year, Yahoo has said that all traffic moving between its data centers is now fully encrypted, and the company is also planning to introduce additional security to other services, including Yahoo Messenger. The company's chief security information officer Alex Stamos made these announcements in a blog post yesterday.
"Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform for all users at all time, by default", he said, adding that the "broader mission is to not only make Yahoo secure, but improve the security of the overall web ecosystem".
In November last year, the company announced that it will encrypt all products in wake of the NSA spying revelations. Yahoo was one of the companies that the NSA targeted by tapping data cables between its data centers.
Yahoo's homepage and all search queries that run on it now have HTTPS encryption enabled by default. Although that's not the case for all of the company's properties yet, users can manually trigger an encrypted session for Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and Good Morning America on Yahoo by typing “https” before the site URL in their web browser.
Back in January, the company also strengthened the security of its email service by making browsing over HTTPS the default.
Without specifically mentioning the NSA surveillance program, Stamos said that the company is working hard to implement the best possible technology to protect their users' privacy.
He told Techcrunch that partner companies are being asked to meet Yahoo’s new encryption standards, and those who are unable to do so are being shown the door. Some of the partners who couldn't meet the new standards have already departed, he added.
