MEGA Turns 5 and Achieves 100 Million Registered Users

1,826 days, 100 million registered users, 40 billion encrypted files. A lot has changed in the 5 years since MEGA first booted on 20 January 2013, offering users 50 GB of free storage and a breakthrough encryption system. While encryption has been widely available for many years, most systems remain complex and difficult to use. MEGA’s simple implementation, where files are encrypted and decrypted within the user’s browser, is still unique 5 years later.

MEGA’s revolutionary technology was quickly recognised. Within three days, 1 million users were enjoying secure file hosting with user-controlled encryption – accessible on any computer through a standard web browser! Since then, MEGA’s growth has continued unrestrained, and on its fifth birthday, MEGA also celebrates the 100 millionth registered user.

All this generates a lot of traffic, and MEGA consistently ranks among the Internet’s most popular websites:

MEGA Features

MEGA was founded upon innovation and continues to develop exciting new features. The user-controlled encryption, initially only available through web access, is now supported by apps on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, in addition to plugins for Firefox and Google Chrome. The MEGA desktop app provides automatic file syncing, streaming and transfer management and is available for Windows, macOS and all major Linux distributions.

MEGA also supports more than 30 languages.

In recent months, MEGA has unveiled several new major features to meet user requests:

Video/voice/text chat

End-to-end user-encrypted MEGA video chat allows for total privacy, and has been available through the browser since 2016. Now it has been extended to Android and iOS, with chat history accessible across multiple devices. Users can also easily add files to a chat from their MEGA cloud drive.

File Versioning

Deleted or overwritten files have always been stored in the MEGA rubbish folder, where users can retrieve the old file. Now it’s even simpler. Multiple versions of the user’s file are auto-saved when updated, and all previous versions are viewable by clicking on the clock icon in the cloud drive. Users no longer need to manually save multiple versions of every document – if they’re unhappy with any changes, they can be reverted with a single click.

MEGAdrop

Users can now create folders that anyone can upload to directly. This is ideal for organisations that need to receive large files from the general public, e.g. printing studios. All files are encrypted by the recipient's public RSA key.

Streaming

Encrypted mp4 files can now be viewed online without waiting to download the complete file. This allows users to preview mp4 video before deciding whether to download or not. The streaming capability will be extended to other file types in the coming months.

Other features

MEGAbird – an add-on for Thunderbird email client to integrate MEGA’s ability to transfer large files; 

MEGAcmd – an interactive, text console based, scriptable MEGA client, suitable for IT professionals to create backup and other custom solutions.

Privacy and Security

Some cloud storage services claim to be ‘fully encrypted’ and mention encryption ‘in transit and at rest’. However, those services hold the encryption keys and can decrypt any of the user’s content, in addition to any other party who hacks the system.

MEGA decided to provide Privacy by Design rather than just Privacy by Policy. MEGA’s encryption is implemented right at the user’s device (computer, phone, tablet etc), so instead of just promising to secure the users files, it is impossible for MEGA to decrypt the content.

To enhance users’ confidence in the MEGA system, all of the client-side code is published, so interested security researchers can evaluate the encryption process. MEGA offers a vulnerability bounty and has paid out a total of 
EUR 15,000 for some minor vulnerabilities that were reported between 2013 and 2016. However, MEGA’s brute-force challenge, issued in February 2013, hasn’t been claimed and we are confident it never will be!