Looking at the source of News::Scan, Net::NNTP is used to make a connection to the NNTP server with the following command:

$client = Net::NNTP->new(@args);

Net::NNTP uses IO::Socket under the hood, so you may be able to create Net::NNTP::SSL which would use IO::Socket::SSL instead to make the connection over SSL. IO::Socket::SSL is described as 'Nearly transparent SSL encapsulation for IO::Socket::INET', so I would think that this approach may be the cleanest for a perl based solution.

Update: Adjusted comment after realizing the poster already stated that the server requires ssl.