Security News

Google Chrome now warns when downloading risky password-protected files and provides improved alerts with more information about potentially malicious downloaded files. The Chrome browser now also sends suspicious files to the company's servers for a deeper scan for users with Enhanced Protection mode enabled in Safe Browsing, providing extra protection while "Reducing user friction."

Google Chrome now warns when downloading risky password-protected files and provides improved alerts with more information about potentially malicious downloaded files. [...]

Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them Google promotes its reCAPTCHA service as a security mechanism for websites, but researchers...

Google on Monday abandoned plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies in its Chrome web browser more than four years after it introduced the option as part of a larger set of a controversial proposal called the Privacy Sandbox. The significant policy reversal comes nearly three months following the company's announcement that it intends to eliminate third-party cookies starting early next year after repeated delays, underscoring the project's tumultuous history.

Google no longer intends to drop support for third-party cookies - the online identifiers used by the ad industry to track people and target them with ads based on their online activities. The Privacy Sandbox - a suite of APIs for notionally privacy-protecting online ad delivery and analytics - will co-exist with third-party cookies in Chrome for the foreseeable future.

Google has scrapped its plan to kill third-party cookies in Chrome and will instead introduce a new browser experience to allows users to limit how these cookies are used. [...]

A Latin America-based financially motivated actor codenamed FLUXROOT has been observed leveraging Google Cloud serverless projects to orchestrate credential phishing activity, highlighting the abuse of the cloud computing model for malicious purposes. The campaign involved the use of Google Cloud container URLs to host credential phishing pages with the aim of harvesting login information associated with Mercado Pago, an online payments platform popular in the LATAM region.

Details have emerged about a "Massive ad fraud operation" that leverages hundreds of apps on the Google Play Store to perform a host of nefarious activities. "Konfety represents a new form of fraud and obfuscation, in which threat actors operate 'evil twin' versions of 'decoy twin' apps available on major marketplaces," HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence Team said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News.

Google appears to be attempting a play for the crown, as it is reportedly poised to acquire infosec upstart Wiz. According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Google is deep in talks to buy Wiz for $23 billion - the largest-ever sum its parent company Alphabet has paid for prey.

Google has announced a fivefold increase in payouts for bugs found in its systems and applications reported through its Vulnerability Reward Program, with a new maximum bounty of $151,515 for a single security flaw."As our systems have become more secure over time, we know it is taking much longer to find bugs - with that in mind, we are very excited to announce that we are updating our reward amounts by up to 5x," Google said.