Encrypted Web Traffic Spiked Since Snowden Leaks

Across Europe the level of encrypted traffic has quadrupled since last year when the Edward Snowden revelations on mass Internet snooping broke.

That’s according to figures from traffic management company Sandvine, which released its Global Internet Phenomena report this week, although failed to make a note of the jump in SSL traffic from 1.47 percent to 6.10 percent, TorrentFreak reported.

In the US, there was an increase from 2.29 percent to 3.80 percent, whilst in Latin America there was a leap up of web encryption usage from 1.80 percent to 10.37 percent.

A Snowden boost for SSL

Many have upped SSL usage, including major web services like Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter, since the Snowden leaks, which showed the US National Security Agency and GCHQ were tapping Internet cables to gather citizens’ metadata.

Yet weaknesses in SSL were highlighted by the Heartbleed vulnerability, which intelligence agencies may have known about for two years before it was publicly disclosed earlier this year.

Cracking SSL has also been one of the NSA’s and GCHQ’s chief goals, according to the Snowden leaks, which also indicated they were finding encryption cracking in general extremely difficult.

The Sandvine figures also showed a decline of six percent of traffic during peak period for BitTorrent, whilst in Europe it increased.

“In our last report, we revealed that for the first time filesharing as a whole accounted for less than 10 percent,” the report read. “Of total daily traffic, and that trend continues with Filesharing now responsible for just 8.3 percent of daily network traffic.

What do you know about Internet security? Find out with our quiz!