BlackBerry Acquires Encryption Service Secusmart

BlackBerry has acquired the encryption service that manages German Chancellor Angela Merkel's secrets.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, security has been top of mind for consumers and businesses alike, and BlackBerry is hoping to take advantage of that with the acquisition of high-security voice and data encryption service Secusmart.

Terms of the deal were not immediately revealed.

The companies have previously partnered to bring Secusmart's technology to BlackBerry; SecuSUITE for BlackBerry 10 was selected last year by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security for the government's classified communications.

"We are always improving our security solutions to keep up with the growing complexity of enterprise mobility, with devices being used for more critical tasks and to store more critical information, and security attacks becoming more sophisticated," BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a statement.

This acquisition "underscores our focus on addressing growing security costs and threats," Chen said. It also demonstrates the company's commitment to international agencies, counting among its customers all G7 governments, 16 of the G20 ministries, and a number of global enterprises. That includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel, BlackBerry said, who reportedly had her cell phone bugged by U.S. intelligence last year.

According to the company, BlackBerry carries more security certifications than any other mobile vendor, and is the only organization with official approval to run on U.S. Department of Defense networks.

"Secusmart and BlackBerry's solution already meets the highest security requirements of the German federal authorities and NATO for restricted communications," said Dr. Hans-Christoph Quelle, managing director of Secusmart. "We see significant opportunities to introduce Secusmart's solutions to more of BlackBerry's government and enterprise customers around the world."

BlackBerry recently updated its BBM messaging service to add Protected: the first solution in the recently announced eBBM Suite for "secure enterprise-class messaging."

BBM Protected provides separate encryption keys for each message sent, rather than one for an entire conversation, meaning a hacker would have to crack each individual code and then string them together to see the whole chat.

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BlackBerry Acquires Encryption Service Secusmart