Encrypted cloud storage service Wuala announced today they’re shutting down, going read-only on September 30th and purging data on November 15th. Wuala was one of our favourite secure cloud storage services, but it recommends another of our faves, Tresorit.
The good news is, if you’ve paid for an annual subscription, you’re eligible for a refund:
Customers who have an active prepaid annual subscription will be eligible to receive a refund for any unused subscription fees. Your refund will be calculated based on a termination date effective from today’s date, even though the full service will remain active until 30 September 2015 and your data will be available until 15 November 2015. Refunds will be automatically processed and issued to eligible customers in coming weeks. Some exceptions apply. Please visit www.wuala.com for more information.
You can read more in Wuala’s post here.
Comments
2 responses to “Encrypted Cloud Storage Service Wuala Announced Today It’s Shutting Down”
I guess it is hard to compete with free offerings from Google, MS and DropBox. Adding end-to-end encryption is pretty easy with all these services, just by using an encryption tool like TrueCrypt http://truecrypt.org or SyncDocs http://syncdocs.com
It may also be that they received a security letter and chose to shutdown rather than disclosing user data?
Wuala uses client-side encryption and does not provide key escrow. Consequently, all that could be turned over, would be data encrypted with AES-256, which cannot be brute forced with current or foreseeable computing power. Note, this does not mean that AES-256 cannot/has not been broken, but is widely considered EXTREMELY unlikely.