Security News

Google users are currently experiencing issues around the world, with users unable to access Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Calendar, and other Google services. According to DownDetector and user reports, Google services are currently experiencing an outage in the U.S, Europe, and other parts of the world.

Molerats cyberespionage group has been using in recent spear-phishing campaigns fresh malware that relies on Dropbox, Google Drive, and Facebook for command and control communication and to store stolen data. Designed for cyberespionage, the malware attempts to avoid detection and takedown efforts by using Dropbox and Facebook services to steal data and receive instructions from the operators.

Some ad networks are known for ruining Google Chrome's web browsing experience with videos or large images. In September, Google announced that it will start disbanding ad iframes using too many system resources.

Google has snapped up Goldman Sachs cybersecurity veteran Phil Venables to manage security and risk for the important Google Cloud franchise. Venables, a cybersecurity leader with a storied career in the financial services sector, will be Google Cloud's first Chief Information Security Officer.

France's CNIL data privacy watchdog slapped 135 million euros in fines on US tech titans Google and Amazon for placing advertising cookies on users' computers without consent. The 100-million-euro fine against Google is the largest sanction the regulator has ever imposed, which it justified by the fact 90 percent of French internet users use the firm's search engine.

Google, which makes most of its money from online ads, insists it wants ad blockers to continue working under the latest, more locked-down iteration of its Chrome browser extension platform, known as Manifest v3. As a way to measure the problem, Alexandre Blondin, Chrome product manager, pointed out in a blog post on Wednesday that when Google integrated the Chrome Web Store with its Google Safe Browsing infrastructure, "The number of malicious extensions that Chrome disabled to protect people grew by 81 percent."

Google patched ten critical bugs as part of its December Android Security Bulletin. The worst of the bugs was tied to the Android media framework component and gives attacker remote control of vulnerable handsets.

Thales announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud that will accelerate the ability of enterprises to safely migrate sensitive data between public cloud, hybrid and private IT infrastructures. Building on a multi-year history of innovation around a variety of cloud security initiatives, Thales and Google Cloud will now empower customers to leverage the full potential of Google Cloud technology for sensitive workloads while gaining the external key management needed to control and secure data across hybrid cloud IT environments.

Google this week announced the launch of a knowledge base with information on a class of vulnerabilities referred to as cross-site leaks, or XS-Leaks. These vulnerabilities, Google explains, are rooted in the modern web applications' misuse of long-standing web platform behaviors, thus resulting in websites leaking information on the user or the information the user has entered in other web applications.

Google Chrome is getting a new browser heads-up display that displays performance metrics about the web pages you are visiting. To help users analyze these metrics on web pages, Google released a Chrome extension named Web Vitals that displays an on-screen HUD with performance metrics for web pages you are visiting.