Security News
On the former front, Google researchers saw a growing trend emerge towards impersonating news outlets and journalists, especially when it comes to attackers from Iran and North Korea. Attackers impersonate a journalist to seed false stories with other reporters to spread disinformation," explained Toni Gidwani, security engineering manager at the company's Threat Analysis Group, writing in an overview of nation-state trends, published last week.
How to set up an Android phone as your security key for your Google account. Set up two-step verification for your Google account through your phone or a computer by signing into the webpage for your Google account.
In 2019, Google sent nearly 40,000 warnings to accounts that were targeted by state-sponsored phishing or malware attacks, it reported on Thursday. Google's also seen cases wherein attackers first try to chummy up with targets by sending several benign emails to build rapport.
AI, whose artificial intelligence software is purpose-built for engineers, scientists, and researchers and enables them to innovate and make discoveries faster, announced that it had completed contributions to TensorFlow, the world's most popular open-source framework for deep learning created by Google. "Part of Noble's mission is building AI that's accessible to engineers, scientists and researchers, anytime and anywhere, without needing to learn or re-skill into computer science or AI theory," said Dr. Matthew C. Levy, Founder and CEO of Noble.
Google is on track to resume the roll-out of stable Chrome releases next week, but says it will skip one version of the browser.
Google says it has seen a drop in the number of warnings sent for potential government-backed phishing or malware attempts last year, mainly due to improved protection systems. "One reason for this decline is that our new protections are working-attackers' efforts have been slowed down and they're more deliberate in their attempts, meaning attempts are happening less frequently as attackers adapt," Google says.
Preying on public fears, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving to be a goldmine of opportunity for attackers to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. Now in a fresh twist, third-party Android app developers too have begun to take advantage of the situation to use coronavirus-related keywords in their app names, descriptions, or in the package names so as to drop malware, perpetrate financial theft and rank higher in Google Play Store searches related to the topic.
A leader in search and AI-driven analytics announced a deepening of its partnership with Google Cloud to empower enterprises with cloud analytics. A key development of this expanded relationship includes the launch of Embrace for Google Cloud, which enables enterprises to run search and AI-driven analytics directly in Google BigQuery, without moving or caching any data.
More than 50 Android apps on the Google Play Store-most of which were designed for kids and had racked up almost 1 million downloads between them-have been caught using a new trick to secretly click on ads without the knowledge of smartphone users. While the offending apps have been removed from Google Play, the find by Check Point Research is the latest in an avalanche of ad fraud schemes that have plagued the app storefront in recent years, with malware posing as optimizer and utility apps to perform phony clicks on ads.
Researchers have discovered a new family of auto-clicker malware that commits mobile ad fraud, lurking in 56 apps on the Google Play store. Google's uphill battle against malware on Google Play is well known, and the vendor has made a concerted effort in the last couple of years to get rid of bad or unpatched apps and malware.