Twitter Acquires Mobile Security Company

Twitter has acquired mobile security vendor Whisper Systems for an undisclosed sum.

Whisper Systems has a number of security products in beta for Android devices, such as the voice encryption product RedPhone and TextSecure, which encrypts text messages.

“We started Whisper Systems with the goal of improving security and privacy for mobile devices,” the company said in an announcement posted on its Website. “We were attracted to this not only because we saw it as an opportunity to reinvent the security solutions that never really worked in the PC environment to begin with, but also because the stakes are much higher — due to the nature of mobile devices themselves — and we didn’t like the way that things were looking.”

“We ended up tackling the full stack — all the way from application-level solutions at the top of the stack, down through a hardened version of Android, to kernel modifications at the bottom of the stack…Now that we’re joining Twitter, we’re looking forward to bringing our technology and our expertise into Twitter’s products and services,” Whisper Systems said in the announcement.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the acquisition before publication. However, Twitter security has made its way to the front page in recent months, as an analysis from Veracode revealed in September that eight of the 10 most popular Twitter accounts have been hacked since 2009.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson sent the following statement to SecurityWeek in response to our initial inquiry: “The Whisper Systems team is joining Twitter starting today. As part of our fast-growing engineering team, they will be bringing their technology and security expertise to Twitter’s products and services. We’re happy to have Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson onboard.”