Security News

Brave Browser has replaced Google with its own no-tracking privacy-centric Brave Search as the default search engine for new users in five regions. Historically, Brave used Google as its default search engine when searching from the address bar.

A new deceptive ad injection campaign has been found leveraging an ad blocker extension for Google Chrome and Opera web browsers to sneakily insert ads and affiliate codes on websites, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Imperva. The findings come following the discovery of rogue domains distributing an ad injection script in late August 2021 that the researchers connected to an add-on called AllBlock.

Google's Threat Analysis Group on Thursday said it's tracking more than 270 government-backed threat actors from more than 50 countries, adding it has approximately sent 50,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or malware attempts to customers since the start of 2021. Google said it disrupted a number of campaigns mounted by an Iranian state-sponsored attacker group tracked as APT35, including a sophisticated social engineering attack dubbed "Operation SpoofedScholars" aimed at think tanks, journalists, and professors with an aim to solicit sensitive information by masquerading as scholars with the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

Google's VirusTotal service showing that 95 per cent of ransomware malware identified by its systems targets Windows. What systems are most attacked? 93.28 per cent of ransomware detected were Windows executables, and 2 per cent Windows DLLs, the report said.

Google said today that it sent roughly 50,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or hacking attempts to customers during 2021, a considerable increase compared to the previous year. "So far in 2021, we've sent over 50,000 warnings, a nearly 33% increase from this time in 2020," said Ajax Bash, a Google security engineer working with the company's Threat Analysis Group.

An Android app sitting on the Google Play store touts itself to be a photo editor app. Like many Android apps, the "Blender Photo Editor-Easy Photo Background Editor" app comes with the sign-in with Facebook functionality.

Google has warned about 14,000 of its users about being targeted in a state-sponsored phishing campaign from APT28, a threat group that has been linked to Russia. The campaign was detected in late September and accounts for a larger than usual batch of Government-Backed Attack notifications that Google sends to targeted users every month.

Anyone that needs to hide away sections of text in Google Documents should give this handy add-on a try. When whole documents are sensitive, I tend to not write them in Google Docs, but rather a locally installed tool that makes it possible to encrypt a document.

Google has announced plans to automatically enroll about 150 million users into its two-factor authentication scheme by the end of the year as part of its ongoing efforts to prevent unauthorized access to accounts and improve security.The internet giant said it also intends to require 2 million YouTube creators to switch on the setting, which it calls two-step verification, to protect their channels from potential takeover attacks.

Google is going to automatically enroll 150 million users and two million YouTube creators into using two-factor authentication for their accounts by the end of the year, it announced on Tuesday. "And because we know the best way to keep our users safe is to turn on our security protections by default, we have started to automatically configure our users' accounts into a more secure state. By the end of 2021, we plan to auto-enroll an additional 150 million Google users in 2SV and require two million YouTube creators to turn it on."