Security News

Google on Wednesday warned that nation-backed hackers are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to target health care organizations and those working to fight the pandemic. A security team tasked with defending against government-backed cyberattacks on Google and its users said it identified more than a dozen state-sponsored groups using COVID-19 themes as bait in phishing and malware traps.

Google this week announced the availability of a cloud-based solution meant to help work-from-home employees securely access enterprise resources. The newly launched BeyondCorp Remote Access is based on a zero-trust model and provides employees with the ability to remotely access internal web apps from almost any device, from anywhere, even without the use of a VPN. "Over time, we plan to offer the same capability, control, and additional protections for virtually any application or resource a user needs to access," Google says.

Google this week announced the creation of a COVID-19 grant fund aimed to help bug hunters who participate in its Vulnerability Reward Program. The newly introduced grant fund is a temporary expansion of the Internet giant's Vulnerability Research Grant program, which was introduced in 2015 to recognize the time and efforts of security researchers, even if they do not find vulnerabilities.

The tool is called "BeyondCorp" and the search'n'ad giant deployed it in 2011 to provide access to its own web apps. Google decided to launch the tool now because it thinks organisations scrambling to deliver apps to suddenly remote workers will appreciate an approach it promises is faster than rolling out a VPN, according to Sunil Patti, general manager and veep of Google's cloud security business.

For many of the 70 million users Mitel supports each day, the COVID-19 crisis has turned remote working and real-time communications from a modern convenience into a necessity almost overnight. Mitel, a global leader in business communications, and Google Cloud are enabling customers to adapt to this new way of working with secure, reliable and scalable solutions that allow users to communicate and collaborate from anywhere.

ECS, a leader in advanced technology, science, and engineering solutions, announced an expansion of its services as a Google Cloud Platform partner. Through the ECS Cloud Center of Excellence, ECS delivers solutions from leading cloud service providers to deploy mission-critical workloads to some of the largest organizations in the world.

Google just issued a Chrome update with a note that says, "This update includes 1 [critical] security fix." The bug itself is still a secret, even though the Chromium core of the Chrome browser is an open source project.

Over the past week, Google has observed more than 18 million malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 being sent out every day. On a daily basis, Gmail blocks 100 million phishing emails.

Google is striving to block Gmail messages and other content that exploit COVID-19, but there are steps users can take to fight such malware. The popularity of Google Cloud services such as G Suite, Gmail, and Chrome have made their users tempting targets for malware.

In the past week, an average of 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails were sent per day via Gmail to unsuspecting marks, according to Google. Google said its malware scanner uses deep-learning tech to detect malware on 300 billion attachments each week, and 63 per cent of dodgy docs blocked by Gmail are different from day to day.