Security News

Google has officially released the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android 13, offering an "Early look" at the SDK Runtime and Topics API to boost users' privacy online. "The Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview program will run over the course of 2022, with a beta release planned by the end of the year," the search giant said in an overview.

Google has expanded its policies to allow doxxing victims to remove more of their personally identifiable information from search engine results starting earlier this week. While people already had the option to request the removal of personal data that could be used in financial fraud, such as credit card and bank account info, before this update, Google now also allows demands to delete contact information.

Google has announced that all security researchers who report Android 13 Beta vulnerabilities through its Vulnerability Rewards Program will get a 50% bonus on top of the standard reward until May 26th, 2022. Bug hunters can get a maximum payout of $1.5 million for a full remote code execution exploit chain on the Titan M used in Google Pixel Phones running an Android 13 Beta build.

Google on Tuesday officially began rolling out a new "Data safety" section for Android apps on the Play Store to highlight the type of data being collected and shared with third-parties. "Users want to know for what purpose their data is being collected and whether the developer is sharing user data with third parties," Suzanne Frey, Vice President of product for Android security and privacy, said.

Google is rolling out a new Data Safety section on the Play Store, Android's official app repository, where developers must declare what data their software collects from users of their apps. Not only will developers declare what data they collect, but also what data they share with third parties, essentially disclosing the purpose behind the collection.

Federal regulators are taking a closer look at Google's planned $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, a deal designed to boost the web giant's public cloud's cybersecurity capabilities. In announcing its bid March 8, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a statement that "Organizations around the world are facing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges as the sophistication and severity of attacks that were previously used to target major governments are now being used to target companies in every industry."

Google Project Zero called 2021 a "Record year for in-the-wild 0-days," as 58 security vulnerabilities were detected and disclosed during the course of the year. "The large uptick in in-the-wild 0-days in 2021 is due to increased detection and disclosure of these 0-days, rather than simply increased usage of 0-day exploits," Google Project Zero security researcher Maddie Stone said.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has been tagging Google Chrome updates delivered via Google Update as suspicious activity due to a false positive issue. According to Windows system admins reports [1, 2, 3, 4], the security solution began marking Chrome updates as suspicious starting last evening.

Google Project Zero reported 58 exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2021, a record in the short time the team of security researchers has been keeping tabs. In a year-in-review report on the number instances a zero-day bug has been exploited in the wild, researchers noted the number a twofold jump in detected flaws since 2020.

Google's bug hunters say they spotted 58 zero-day vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild last year, which is the most-ever recorded since its Project Zero team started analyzing these in mid-2014. "With this record number of in-the-wild zero-days to analyze we saw that attacker methodology hasn't actually had to change much from previous years," wrote Google security researcher Maddie Stone in Project Zero's third annual review of exploited programming blunders.