Secure messaging apps have always been highly valued among their consumers – but the security ladder keeps going higher and higher. The technology is advancing at a high speed, and organizations are trying to ensure the strictest security standards for messaging apps their employees use. Namely, ever since the abrupt switch to a remote work environment in 2020, companies are seeing a rise in cybersecurity breaches.

In December 2020, we blogged about security issues in Go’s encoding/xml with critical impact on several Go-based SAML implementations. Coordinating the disclosure around those issues was no small feat; we spent months emailing the Go security team, reviewing code, testing and retesting exploits, coming up with workarounds, implementing a validation library, and finally reaching out to SAML library maintainers and 20 different companies downstream.

Security concerns continue to be in the news around the world with the White House issuing an executive order earlier this summer about cybersecurity and the European Union proposing a Joint Cyber Unit to respond to the rising number of security incidents. And the hacking story that won't go away with the "SolarWinds" hackers launching a new global cyberattack at the end of May.

Since we live in a digital world where data has surpassed the value of oil and became the most valuable resource in the world, we start to question our digital security. Data has become more accessible for hackers, which results in a constant increase of cyber-attacks over the years. Most industries function digitally, so cyber-attacks are present everywhere, including sport organizations.

The turbulence of the past year has shown how vulnerable international systems can be to cybercrime and malicious actors. According to reports, cyber attacks have increased by more than 150 percent across Germany since the outbreak of the pandemic. Among US colleagues, the number of leaked government data has even increased by 278 percent.