More people than ever have been conducting more of their lives online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This creates a new landscape for fraudsters to create and release new attacks. Research commissioned by Forrester Consulting showed 84% of companies have seen an increase in bot attacks. 71% of organizations have seen an increase in the amount of successful attacks. 65% of businesses have experienced more frequent attacks and greater revenue loss due to bot attacks. With so many people visiting government websites to learn more about the COVID-19 vaccine, make vaccine appointments, or file for unemployment, these web pages have become prime targets for bot attacks and other abusive activities. But reCAPTCHA Enterprise has helped state governments protect COVID-19 vaccine registration portals and unemployment claims portals from abusive activities.

Assisting with unemployment claims during COVID-19

Alongside the wave of unemployment claims caused by COVID-19, many state government agencies, such as Wisconsin’s Workforce Development, have seen an increase in attempted malicious bot logins on their external websites. Many states have had malicious actors visit unemployment claims portals and enter stolen credentials to file fraudulent unemployment claims. Because many unemployment claims portals are mandated to pay a recipient within 2 weeks, the claims portal processes this fraudulent information and bad actors receive unemployment checks weeks before their false claims are recognized. By then, the fraudsters have their money and have repeated this process using other stolen credentials.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise helps state governments reduce false claims by preventing adversaries from automatically reusing credentials on unemployment claims portals. reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s scale and speed to determine fraudster behavior across the Internet helped some of the largest states in the United States, such as Texas. 

Registering for the COVID-19 Vaccine and accessing state-sponsored resources

Several states, such as Pennsylvania, are challenged by web traffic that fluctuates based on the COVID-19 Vaccine Phase. For example, during Phase 1, there was a large increase in web traffic from both humans and bots because of the demand for the very few available vaccination slots. As more states move into Phase 2 and Phase 3, and the vaccine is more widely available, traffic is increasing because bad actors know more people are coming to these websites to register to be vaccinated. 

reCAPTCHA Enterprise was implemented to stop bad actors from scripting bots to book vaccine appointments and then sell those appointment slots on another website for profit. These fake web pages are falsely promoted as websites where people can register for the vaccine. Vaccine appointments are not the only government system from which fraudsters try to profit. Transportation and social service departments also face frequent attacks, wherein fraudsters try to profit by booking and then selling appointments with those organizations. 

Fending off these attacks was made easier thanks to reCAPTCHA Enterprise, a frictionless fraud detection service that leverages our experience from more than a decade of defending the internet and data for our network of more than 5 million sites. The reCAPTCHA Enterprise platform can understand fraudulent behavior, introduce friction to block bots from booking appointments, and allow legitimate users to access the vaccine portals and other state portals. 

Because reCAPTCHA Enterprise does not require end users to complete captcha challenges, several state governments installed reCAPTCHA Enterprise across search, login, and registration web pages. State governments are also placing reCAPTCHA Enterprise on webpages where end users can access healthcare, receive assistance for housing or food, register motor vehicles, or propose legislation. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise on more pages, it becomes more difficult for malicious software or bots to carry out their attacks against different pages, but not for end users to browse, login into accounts, book appointments, or apply for resources. Because reCAPTCHA Enterprise requires no action from end users to stop fraud, state governments implemented reCAPTCHA Enterprise on all points of interaction on their webpages to ensure maximum security without impacting the user experience. 

Providing security everywhere and pricing for all

Many state governments are familiar with buying cloud services in a pay-as-you-go model. reCAPTCHA Enterprise eased the purchasing process by providing state governments with predictable, scalable, and customizable pricing. State governments know up front how much they can expect to pay each month based on the number of assessments reCAPTCHA Enterprise performs. reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s flexible pricing model keeps pace with the natural fluctuations of visitors to vaccination registration and unemployment claims. reCAPTCHA Enterprise has a dedicated sales team that can tailor pricing to your specific use cases so both your webpages and budget are not compromised. 

reCAPTCHA Enterprise has helped many state governments serve their constituents by making it easier to get vaccinated and collect unemployment. It helps constituents take advantage of public services and makes it more difficult for fraudsters to manipulate and interfere with them. 

To start protecting your web pages from credential stuffing and other attacks, get started with reCAPTCHA Enterprise today.

There is no one way to recover. The past year has seen unprecedented challenges for business across the world, with social distancing and quarantine measures forcing many organizations to quickly adapt to remote working. A new report from BCG Platinion, titled “Finding a New Normal in the Cloud”, points out that while companies have done well to survive so far, the overall business environment is still a tough one with contracted economies and lowered revenues. CIOs have to find the right balance between technological innovation and lowering their cash burn rate. 

The report identifies five key ways in which companies can use cloud computing to optimize their operations and reduce overall IT costs by as much as 10%. 

1. Go beyond VPN

The BCG Platinion report states that companies need “rapid, efficient, highly scalable, and device agnostic solutions”. Traditionally, when employees had to work offsite, companies provided them with VPNs. But the sheer scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has shown these solutions to be expensive, slow, inconvenient, and hard to manage when entire workforces are working remotely.

Instead, BCG Platinion emphasizes the need for cloud-based solutions such as BeyondCorp Enterprise for more secure, more effective, lower cost remote access at scale. BeyondCorp Enterprise offers customers a zero trust platform for simple and secure access with continuous end-to-end protection that can be used on any device at any time. Deliveroo, a global food delivery company headquartered in the UK, uses BeyondCorp Enterprise to bring the zero trust model to its distributed workforce. 

“Having secure access to applications and associated data is critical for our business,” says Vaughn Washington, VP of Engineering at Deliveroo. “With BeyondCorp Enterprise, we manage security at the app level, which removes the need for traditional VPNs and associated risks.”¹

With a low cost cloud subscription model, BeyondCorp Enterprise eliminates the need for hardware, operating, and maintenance costs that come with VPN solutions and can also enable organizations to offer protection to the extended workforce at a fraction of the cost. BCG Platinion estimates that solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise can save companies as much as 50% versus the cost of a traditional VPN. 

2. Use SaaS to keep productivity up 

With so much of the workforce fragmented due to social distancing measures, the need for seamless, efficient collaboration is greater than ever. According to BCG Platinion, a fully functional Software-as-a-Service productivity solution such as Google Workspace helps to “alleviate the traditional costs and burdens around availability, backup, and maintenance of on-premise collaboration infrastructure.” BCG Platinion analysts estimate that adopting a SaaS solution can lower computing costs for end users by up to 35%. 

But working in the cloud does more than lower costs. The BCG Platinion report cites a 2020 study from Forrester that found adopting Google Workspace boosted revenue growth by 1.5%, reduced the need for on-demand tech support by 20%, and cut the risk of data breaches by more than 95%. Over the last year, companies of all sizes have looked on the conditions of the pandemic as an opportunity to change the way they work. 

“Airbus has spent the past year thinking about what it actually means to return to work and we’re looking to support greater flexibility with Google Workspace in a leading role,” says Andrew Plunkett, Airbus Vice President Digital Workplace. “In 2020, we held 5.6M Google Meet sessions and we now have more than 70,000 shared Drives where people collaborate. Google Workspace has changed the way people work at Airbus and that will continue as the solution empowers the hybrid work reality.”²

3. Reduce IT overhead and management costs with cloud-first devices

Working in the cloud can be made even more effective with devices specifically designed for the cloud, says the BCG Platinion report. “Cloud-native devices such as Google’s Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are cost-effective, easy to deploy, simple to use, and highly secure,” says BCG Platinion. Additionally, with “thin client” devices, companies can save on hardware costs compared with traditional laptops and desktops.The report suggests that a thin client approach can produce savings of up to 25% in end-user technology and support. 

Organizations and businesses of all sizes have found that Chrome OS and devices have greatly enhanced their capacity to work together in even the most challenging circumstances. Chrome OS provides employees with a modern experience and devices that stay fast, have built-in security, deploy quickly, and reduce the total cost of ownership. “Chromebooks are simple-to-use and cost-effective devices that do everything that our staff need them to do, which is mainly accessing Google Workspace online,” says Henry Lewis, Head of Platform for the London Borough of Hackney. “As soon as the Grab and Go Chromebooks were available, they were well used every day.”³

4. Lift and shift for easier transitions

While migrating to the cloud is a priority for many organizations to succeed, it does not have to happen all at once and in the same way. A total cloud migration can be a huge undertaking, involving redesigns of architecture and refactoring of applications. For many organizations, this process can take several months, even years. 

But in times like these, CIOs need to make decisions quickly and reduce cash burn as much as possible. When resources are stretched and time is tight, BCG Platinion recommends a “lift-and-shift” approach for minimal disruption. With Google Compute Engine, for example, organizations can simply rehost their existing workloads on virtual machines without transformation. BCG Platinion reports that moving non-critical workloads to the cloud with lift-and-shift approaches can reduce IT spend by as much as 4% in just three months. Additionally, a quick, effective migration paves the way for more advanced IT infrastructure changes, creating effects that ripple long into the future. 

5. Make data work for you with the cloud

Data is central to any industry and making the most out of it is more important now than ever before. With business as usual upended by the pandemic, organizations have turned to data for urgent tasks like demand forecasting or predicting supply-chain disruptions. A McKinsey report from last year points out that while many organisations had already started to engage with analytics and AI technologies, their progress was dramatically accelerated by the urgency of the pandemic: “Analytics capabilities that once might have taken these organizations months or years to build came to life in a matter of weeks.”

With the right setup a company can use data to drive efficiencies, respond quickly to its customers and open new markets. But big wins require huge amounts of information and powerful analytics, which means that effective data handling can be very difficult and expensive to do with on-premises architecture. 

Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure minimizes infrastructure costs while opening up cutting edge techniques like machine learning for greater insight. The BCG Platinion report found that using a cloud-based data platform was not only cheaper and more efficient for businesses, but could result in a 70% increase in “effectiveness” which it defined as increased sales, lower costs of procured goods, and reduced inventory holding costs. “Moving to cloud provides competitive advantage as you scale innovation, accelerating the creation of new services to keep ahead of the competition,” explains Norbert Faure, Managing Director, Platinion Western Europe at Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

The key mission of any data platform is to make sure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time. Google Cloud helps to unify data across the entire business, increase agility, and innovate faster with a range of products. BigQuery runs complex analytics at infinite scale while helping organizations save up to 34% on the total cost of ownership compared with alternative cloud-based data warehouse solutions.⁴ Cloud Spanner provides a fully managed relational database that operates at 99.999% availability. Meanwhile, with Vertex AI, businesses can access the same groundbreaking machine learning tools that Google uses itself for unprecedented insight on a unified AI platform. “The whole Google Cloud suite of products accelerates the process of getting established and up and running, so we can perform the ‘bread-and-butter’ work of data science,” says David Herberich, VP, Head of Data at fintech startup Branch.⁵

Minimize costs today, innovate for tomorrow

As the world recovers from the pandemic, continued success depends on staying nimble and adaptive, argues the BCG Platinion report. Cloud computing can make companies more resilient by helping them to keep costs low, reducing overall IT spend by as much as 10% overall according to BCG Platinion. “For CIOs, cloud migrations can offer important near-term savings and benefits, while also reinvigorating progress toward the long-term goal of digital transformation.“

To learn more, read the full report from BCG Platinion.

^{1. BeyondCorp Enterprise: Introducing a safer era of computing
2. Building the future of work with Google Workspace
3. Hackney Council: Empowering 4,000 staff to keep serving their community from home
4. The Economic Advantages of Google BigQuery versus Alternative Cloud-based EDW Solutions
5. Fintech startup, Branch makes data analytics easy with BigQuery}

Today, we are putting the power of Google’s insights and intelligence in the hands of risk, fraud, and security teams everywhere. We are pleased to announce the general availability of reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention, a new product that uses Google’s own fraud models, machine learning, and intelligence from protecting more than 6 million websites to help stop payment fraud.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention can help protect payment transactions by identifying targeted manual attacks and large-scale fraud attempts. It automatically trains fraud models based on behavior and transaction data to identify events that are likely fraudulent and could cause a dispute or chargeback if accepted. 

When threat actors are identified and blocked on any site in the reCAPTCHA network, the intelligence is made available to help protect other organizations from those same attackers. Organizations can then use the scores to send the transaction for manual review or directly block suspicious transactions, drive increased trust in their legitimate transactions, reduce the amount of friction for good users, and reduce erroneous rejection rates.

“Being a safe and trusted place to give and receive help is our top priority. We are constantly innovating, refining and enhancing our fraud defenses and Google’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention adds another layer of industry-leading protection for our users. Combining Google’s rich security expertise with GoFundMe’s focus on fraud prevention is already showing promising results as we strive to keep our platform the safest place to give online,” said Matthew Murray, director of risk, GoFundMe.

According to data obtained from our customers using reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention in private Preview, the new solution can help drive comprehensive value for organizations by:

• Reducing fraud losses: Get behavior modeling (not just mouse movements), stop financial damage created by account takeovers (ATOs), and connect fraud and abuse intelligence across your site and application.
• Increasing legitimate sales: Fraud Prevention can help businesses increase their revenue by providing insights to understand who good users are, who may otherwise be caught in an overly aggressive, customer restrictive fraud model.*

These benefits  are enabled for organizations by:

• Preventing advanced attacks: Stopping sophisticated attacks in an environment where attackers use cloud fraud infrastructure, and data leaks, virtual cards and VPN usage are on the rise
• Increasing trust in good transactions: Focus on good approval rates through a unique combination of supervised and unsupervised models
• Improving customer experience: By preventing fraudulent transactions with zero user friction, Fraud Prevention can help businesses protect legitimate users and increase customer retention

Our customers have used these new capabilities in preview in customer experiences that include online checkouts and payment transactions. Fraud Prevention has been used by merchants and payment processors to block millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions in a frictionless way. 

reCAPTCHA Enterprise provides a comprehensive online fraud detection platform that helps prevent fraudulent, spammy, and abusive digital client activity across your web and application footprint. This platform includes Account Defender, which protects users from account takeovers (ATO), frictionless bot management capabilities, and password leak detection to identify compromised accounts. With an additional API call for Fraud Prevention, organizations can leverage a comprehensive solution to secure financial transactions along with core reCAPTCHA Enterprise capabilities. 

To get started, organizations can install a score-based site key on each part of the payment user flow front end and send transaction data when a purchase occurs. This site key helps train site-specific fraud models and start returning fraud scores for each transaction. 

Ready to put reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention to work? Contact our fraud specialists or your customer success CSM team and sign up with the free tier. You learn more about these new capabilities in reCAPTCHA Enterprise in our product documentation. You can also register for our webinar where our experts will be discussing this capability in great detail on June 1, 2023. 

Coming up at our Security Summit on June 13-14, you can hear how reCAPTCHA Enterprise helped GoFundMe secure their donors from fraud. Sign up here for free Security Summit registration.

At Google Cloud, we believe that the protection of our customers’ sensitive data is paramount, and encryption is a powerful mechanism to help achieve this goal. For years, we have supported encryption in transit when our customers ingest their data to bring it to the cloud. We’ve also long supported encryption at rest, for all customer content stored in Google Cloud.

To complete the full data protection lifecycle, we can protect customer data when it’s processed through our Confidential Computing portfolio. Confidential Computing products from Google Cloud protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware isolated environment that is encrypted with keys managed by the processor and unavailable to the operator. These isolated environments help prevent unauthorized access or modification of applications and data while in use, thereby increasing the security assurances for organizations that manage sensitive and regulated data in public cloud infrastructure.

Secure isolation has always been a critical component of our cloud infrastructure; with Confidential Computing, this isolation is cryptographically reinforced. Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing products leverage security components in AMD EPYC™ processors including AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology.

Building trust in Confidential Computing through industry collaboration

Part of our mission to bring Confidential Computing technology to more cloud workloads and services is to make sure that the hardware and software used to build these technologies is continuously reviewed and tested. We evaluate different attack vectors to help ensure Google Cloud Confidential Computing environments are protected against a broad range of attacks. As part of this evaluation, we recognize that the secure use of our services and the Internet ecosystem as a whole depends on interactions with applications, hardware, software, and services that Google doesn’t own or operate.

The Google Cloud Security team, Google Project Zero, and the AMD firmware and product security teams collaborated for several months to conduct a detailed review of the technology and firmware that powers AMD Confidential Computing technology. This review covered both Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) capable CPUs, and the next generation of Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) capable CPUs which protect confidential VMs against the hypervisor itself. The goal of this review was to work together and analyze the firmware and technologies AMD uses to help build Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing services to further build trust in these technologies.

This in-depth review focused on the implementation of the AMD secure processor in the third generation AMD EPYC processor family delivering SEV-SNP. SNP further improves the posture of confidential computing using technology that removes the hypervisor from the trust boundary of the guest, allowing customers to treat the Cloud Service Provider as another untrusted party. The review covered several AMD secure processor components and evaluated multiple different attack vectors. The collective group reviewed the design and source code implementation of SEV, wrote custom test code, and ran hardware security tests, attempting to identify any potential vulnerabilities that could affect this environment.

Working on this review, the security teams identified and confirmed potential issues of varying severity. AMD was diligent in fixing all applicable issues and now offers updated firmware through its OEM channels. Google Cloud’s AMD-based Confidential Computing solutions now include all the mitigations implemented during the security review.

“At Google, we believe that investing in security research outside of our own platforms is a critical step in keeping organizations across the broader ecosystem safe,” said Royal Hansen, vice president of Security Engineering at Google. “At the end of the day, we all benefit from a secure ecosystem that organizations rely on for their technology needs and that is why we’re incredibly appreciative of our strong collaboration with AMD on these efforts.”

“Together, AMD and Google Cloud are continuing to advance Confidential Computing, helping enterprises to move sensitive workloads to the cloud with high levels of privacy and security, without compromising performance,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. ”Continuously investing in the security of these technologies through collaboration with the industry is critical to providing customer transformation through Confidential Computing. We’re thankful to have partnered with Google Cloud and the Google Security teams to advance our security technology and help shape future Confidential Computing innovations to come.”

Reviewing trusted execution environments for security is difficult given the closed-source firmware and proprietary hardware components. This is why research and collaborations such as this are critical to improve the security of foundational components that support the broader Internet ecosystem. AMD and Google believe that transparency helps provide further assurance to customers adopting Confidential Computing, and to that end AMD is working toward a model of open source security firmware.

With the analysis now complete and the vulnerabilities addressed, the AMD and Google security teams agree that the AMD firmware which enables Confidential Computing solutions meets an elevated security bar for customers, as the firmware design updates mitigate several bug classes and offer a way to recover from vulnerabilities. More importantly, the review also found that Confidential VMs are protected against a broad range of attacks described in the review.

Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio

The Google Cloud Confidential VMs, Dataproc Confidential Compute, and Confidential GKE Nodes have enabled high levels of security and privacy to address our customers’ data protection needs without compromising usability, performance, and scale. Our mission is to make this technology ubiquitous across the cloud. Confidential VMs run on hosts with AMD EPYC processors which feature AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Incorporating SEV into Confidential VMs provide benefits and features including:

Isolation: Memory encryption keys are generated by the AMD Secure Processor during VM creation and reside solely within the AMD Secure Processor. Other VM encryption keys such as for disk encryption can be generated and managed by an external key manager or in Google Cloud HSM. Both sets of these keys are not accessible by Google Cloud, offering strong isolation.

Attestation: Confidential VMs use Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) attestation. Every time a Confidential VM boots, a launch attestation report event is generated and posted to customer cloud logging, which gives administrators the opportunity to act as necessary.

Performance: Confidential Computing offers high performance for demanding computational tasks. Enabling Confidential VM has little or no impact on most workloads.

The future of Confidential Computing and secure platforms

While there are no absolutes in computer security, collaborative research efforts help uncover security vulnerabilities that can emerge in complex environments and help to prevent Confidential Computing solutions from threats today and into the future. Ultimately, this helps us increase levels of trust for customers.

We believe Confidential Computing is an industry-wide effort that is critical for securing sensitive workloads in the cloud and are grateful to AMD for their continued collaboration on this journey.

To read the full security review, visit this page.

Acknowledgments 

We thank the many Google security team members who contributed to this ongoing security collaboration and review, including James Forshaw, Jann Horn and Mark Brand.

We are grateful for the open collaboration with AMD engineers, and wish to thank David Kaplan, Richard Relph and Nathan Nadarajah for their commitment to product security. We would also like to thank AMD leadership: Ab Nacef, Prabhu Jayanna, Hugo Romero, Andrej Zdravkovic and Mark Papermaster for their support of this joint effort.

In cybersecurity, speed matters. Whether a security analyst is trying to understand the details of an alert that was triggered by an indicator of compromise (IoC), or find additional context for a suspicious asset, speed is often the critical factor that will help thwart a cyberattack before threat actors are able to inflict damage.

With speed in mind, we are pleased to announce the general availability of our new investigative experience in Chronicle Security Operations. We are continuing to deliver on our mission to bring the power of Google to security operations and are raising the bar for search and the investigative experience in the SOC.

With this release, SecOps teams will be able to harness Chronicle’s lightning-fast search across any form of structured data. Additionally, the new investigation experience can provide greater flexibility to pivot and drill-down when conducting complex, open-ended threat investigations and surface insights quickly and easily.

Our Unified Data Model (UDM) schema, with its built-in flexibility that can effectively handle a wide variety of security related events, is at the heart of Chronicle’s powerful search. We have scaled this capability by optimizing query responses across structured data. Additionally, analysts can investigate large datasets and build complex queries with a new and intuitive user experience. With user personalization enhancements, analysts can quickly access saved searches and top queries in their environment to improve routine SOC workflows.

With the new investigative experience, security teams can:

• Drive faster threat understanding with an interactive event results timeline that helps eliminate unnecessary long wait times by streaming results as they are processed to quickly begin threat analysis
• Use enhanced context and operationalize relevant data for threat analysis with one-click filter-to-query conversion
• Personalize the analyst experience with saved search and search history functions for quicker analyst knowledge recall
• Power threat investigation and hunting with a new, improved, highly performant UDM search

Let’s look at an example of how to use the reimagined investigative experience and our new broader, faster search.

In our use-case, a security analyst is investigating a curated detection alert for potentially suspicious behavior on a Windows environment. Additionally, there is a low prevalence domain from host “win-dc-01” with ip “10.166.0.3”. To investigate further, let’s open the UDM Search page and construct a query containing the host and IP information along with destination information of the domain the host was contacting (edge.microsoft.com). Over 70,000 events stream into the investigation interface providing the analyst an immediate picture of data surrounding their alert.

The new interactive events timeline can provide a clear picture of event trends over time with key statistical data which can be easily filtered. Additionally, with the new quick filters, the analyst is able to easily filter out hosts that are known-good to get pertinent information about the domain.

Analyzing value aggregations present in the filter panel, automatically generated by Chronicle, enables analysts to domain values of highest interest, and quickly determine that approximately 800 events were present in the last week that related to edge.microsoft.com URL. Since Microsoft Edge is disallowed in the organization, there should not be any outbound traffic to this type of destination.

As a final step before orchestrating a response in Chronicle SOAR’s case management, the analyst can save their search to quickly recall the steps they took in the future for related investigations.

We have already seen our customers use these new capabilities in preview to build new use cases, accelerate existing threat hunting workflows, and drive faster threat response. We will continue our mission to bring Google speed, scale, and intelligence to the investigative experience, expediting “time to aha” for security analysts, and driving better, faster responses.

Ready to put Chronicle to work in your Security Operations Center? Contact Google Cloud sales or your customer success CSM team. You can also learn more about all these new capabilities in Google Chronicle in our product documentation.