A rival home for TrueCrypt has been launched on a Swiss domain with the intention of maintaining the encryption software and establishing a new community around it.
Under a banner proclaiming that "TrueCrypt must not die", the website advertises itself as a news portal for the software, and having uploaded the source code to github is considering forking the project under a new name.
It said: "Currently it is very unclear what really happened. Was it really just the end of a 10 year effort, or was it driven by some government?
"While a simple defacement is more and more unlikely we still don’t know where this is going. However, the last 36 hours showed clearly that TrueCrypt is a fragile product and must be based on more solid ground."
The team behind the move is led by Joseph Doekbrijder, an IT security entrepreneur, and Thomas Bruderer, a Swiss software engineer and former president of the country’s Pirate Party.
So far, the new website has chalked up 4,000 downloads for the software, established a Twitter following of 1,600, and received an alleged copyright takedown notice from the US, though they have yet to confirm its legitimacy.
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TrueCrypt’s original home at truecrypt.org advised users to abandon the software last week, claiming it was insecure and that since Windows XP support had ended there was no call for the service.
Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at John Hopkins University and fundraiser for TrueCrypt’s audit, speculated that the project was axed because somebody was trying to de-anonymise the secretive team behind it.
