Security News

Google has removed nearly 600 Android apps from the Play Store for serving up obnoxious, invasive ads that aren't easily "x'd" out of. Google said Thursday that the apps violated its disruptive ads policy - and are therefore also banned from Google's ad monetization platforms, Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager.

Snowflake, the cloud data platform, announced general availability on Google Cloud, bringing together Snowflake's cloud-native data platform with Google Cloud's capabilities in AI, ML and analytics. Combined with the new database replication feature, Snowflake makes it easy for customers to migrate their data to Google Cloud or keep their database data synchronized between multiple cloud providers for business continuity.

Google this week announced that users in 10 countries can now take advantage of the hardware based two-factor authentication functionality offered by the Titan Security Keys. These security keys provide additional security for users at higher risk, including IT administrators, executives, politicians, and activists, as they are often the intended victims of targeted attacks.

For the second time within two months, Google has removed United Arab Emirates-developed messaging application ToTok from Google Play. At the end of December, the popular mobile application was removed from both the Google Play marketplace and Apple's App Store, after The New York Times reported that the UAE government was using it to spy on users.

Google has removed more than 500 extensions from the Chrome Web Store after they were found performing covert data exfiltration activities. Independent security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco's Duo Labs originally identified a network of 70 copycat plugins with 1.7 million users that were infecting users' browsers and exfiltrating data.

Google has removed 500 Chrome extensions from its online store after researchers found that attackers were using them to steal browser data, according to a new report from security firm Duo Security. In a message to the researchers that it had removed the extensions, Google noted that it "Regularly sweeps to find extensions using similar techniques, code and behaviors and take down those extensions if they violate our policies."

In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher's ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google's automated anti-fraud systems suspend the user's AdSense account for suspicious traffic. The message goes on to warn that while the targeted site's ad revenue will be briefly increased, "AdSense traffic assessment algorithms will detect very fast such a web traffic pattern as fraudulent."

Google has abruptly pulled over 500 Chrome extensions from its Web Store that researchers discovered were stealing browsing data and executing click fraud and malvertising after installing themselves on the computers of millions of users. Depending on which way you look at it, that's either a good result because they're no longer free to infect users, or an example of how easy it is for malicious extensions to sneak on the Web Store and stay there for years without Google noticing.

Last week, a court forced Google to reveal the details of an anonymous poster who published a bad review of his business. According to the court judgement, the anonymous poster used the pseudonym CBsm 23 to publish a review on Google about a procedure they had undergone at Kabbabe's clinic.

Google has removed more than 500 Chrome extensions in response to a report from a security researcher, who found the browser plugins distributed through the Chrome Web Store facilitated ad fraud and data theft. Using a free extension forensic analysis tool called CRXcavator, released last year by Cisco's Duo Security, independent infosec bod Jamila Kaya spotted a set of similarly coded Chrome extensions "That infected users and exfiltrated data through malvertising while attempting to evade fraud detection on the Google Chrome Web Store," said Kaya, and Jacob Rickerd, a security engineer at Duo, in a blog post this week.