Defining cloud’s future: How autonomic data security can help
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“Ninety percent of all data today was created in the last two years—that’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day,” according to business data analytics company Domo. That would be a mind-bending statistic, except that it’s already five years old.
As data usage has undergone drastic expansion and changes in the past five years, so have your business needs for data. Technology such as cloud computing and AI have changed how we use data, derive value from data, and glean insights from data. Your organization is no longer just crunching and re-crunching the same data sets. Data moves, shifts, and replicates, as you mingle data sets and gain new value in the process, as we say in our Data Cloud story. All the while, your data resides in—and is being created in—new places.
Data lives in a myriad of locations now and requires access from different locations and mediums, yet many of today’s security models are not geared towards this. In short, your data has fallen out of love with your security model, but attackers have not. So, how do we realign data and security so they are once again in a healthy relationship?
Google Cloud, as a leader in cloud data management and cloud security, is positioned uniquely to define and lead this effort. We’ve identified some challenges around the classic approach to data security and the changes triggered by the near-ubiquity of the cloud. The case is compelling for adopting a modern approach to data security. We contend that the optimal way forward is with autonomic data security.
A relatively new concept, autonomic data security is security that’s been integrated with data throughout its lifecycle. It can make things easier on users by freeing them from defining and redefining myriad rules about who can do what, when, where. It’s an approach that keeps pace with constantly evolving cyberthreats and business changes.
Autonomic data security can help you keep your IT assets more secure and can make your business and IT processes speedier. For example, data sharing with partners and data access decisions simultaneously becomes faster and more secure. This may sound like magic, but in fact relies on a constant willingness to change and adapt to both business changes and threat evolution.
Taking the precepts, concepts, and forward-looking solutions presented in this paper into consideration, we strongly believe that now is the right time to assess where you and your business are when it comes to data security. Cloud also brings an incredible scale of computing. Where gigabytes once roamed, petabytes are now common. This means that many data security approaches, especially the manual ones, are no longer practical.
To prepare for the future of data security, we recommend you challenge your current model and assumptions and ask critical questions, evaluate where you are, and then start to put a plan in place of how you could start incorporating the autonomic data security pillars into your data security model.
There are two sets of questions organizations need to discover the answers to as they start this journey. The first set of questions will help you identify the nature and status of your data, and inform the answers to the second set.
- What data do I have?
- Who owns it?
- Is it sensitive?
- How is it used?
- What is the value in storing the data?
The second set focuses on higher-level problems:
- What is my current approach to data security?
- Where does it fail to support the business and counter the threats?
- Does it support my business?
- Should I consider making a change? And if yes, in what direction?
The path to improved data security starts by asking the right questions. You can read the full Autonomic Data Security paper for a more in-depth exploration here and learn more about the idea in this podcast episode.
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Accelerate Your Digital Transformation Through a Modern Infrastructure
Learn about the latest advancements to Google Cloud Platform’s unique infrastructure to accelerate enterprise workloads and build planet scalable solutions. Hear how Google Cloud’s infrastructure enables you to solve problems faster, more securely, and at greater scale.
See how Google Cloud is accelerating the support for enterprise workloads like SAP, VMware, and Windows and augmenting new capabilities to better protect and secure your workloads. Discover how Google Cloud enables businesses to build high-scale applications with global scale and reach.
Google Unveils New Cloud Region in Delhi NCR to Power India’s Digitization
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In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open.
Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific.
What customers and partners are saying
Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region:
- InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
- Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
- HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.
- Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
- “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”
A global network of regions
Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.
With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.
Supporting India’s recovery with training and education
Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery.
Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.
Helping customers build their transformation clouds
Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention: Stop Payment Fraud with Google’s Intelligence
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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.
The SolarWinds Attack: A Case Study in Supply Chain Threats
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Our quarterly Security Talks series brings together experts from Google Cloud Security teams and the industry to share information on our latest security products, innovations and best practices. Below is an introduction to Mandiant’s Security Talks presentation on Dec. 7, Mandiant Tales from the Front Lines: Activate Cyber Defenses Against Supply Chain Compromise.
The discovery in December 2020 of the SolarWinds supply chain compromise, a global computer intrusion campaign, caused organizations and security leaders to completely reassess their Cyber Threat Profiles, risk assessments, and defensive postures. It was a rare, watershed event that savvy security leaders and IT decision makers have been using to improve how security teams protect systems, networks, and data across industries and sectors, especially critical infrastructure. Two years later, we’re looking back at the security incident, what we’ve learned, and how it continues to drive change across security teams and organizations.
The SolarWinds compromise leveraged access to the software maker’s Orion business software in order to distribute a malicious update containing malware. Mandiant has since attributed this operation to APT29, a Russia-based espionage group assessed to be sponsored by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). This operation afforded APT29 with unparalleled access to an estimated 18,000 global organizations for follow-on targeting based on the attacker’s discretion and collection priorities.
While the security industry has yet to see anything that rivals the scale and scope of the SolarWinds compromise since it was discovered, a recent Google Cloud research report on software supply chain security found that there’s been a sharp increase in software supply chain attacks across nearly every sector.
Mandiant analysis identified supply chain compromise as the second-most prevalent initial infection vector in 2021. When the initial infection vector was identified, supply chain compromise accounted for 17% of intrusions in 2021 compared to less than 1% of intrusions in 2020. Further, 86% of supply chain compromise intrusions in 2021 were related to the SolarWinds breach.
Since 2020, Mandiant has also observed an increase in financially-motivated threat actors targeting the software supply chain. These actors compromised popular software packages and even mobile applications in order to deploy ransomware, cryptocurrency miners, and banking trojans. In one case, malicious code was inserted into a popular package, prompting the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) to issue an alert about the compromise.
Mitigation recommendations
The discovery of the SolarWinds incident resulted in increased global attention around supply chain compromise threats. Government authorities and technology organizations have responded with several initiatives, legislation, and studies seeking to reduce software supply chain and software dependency risk. Although these initiatives may make it more difficult for threat actors to conduct these operations, organizations should also take steps to mitigate supply chain threats.
Mandiant suggests that organizations contemplate applying multiple layers of security policies, plans, and solutions to maximize opportunities to provide early threat detection and prevent an anomaly or compromise stemming from the supply chain. This guidance is aligned with best practices Google Cloud has recommended for organizations to improve their software supply chain security.
Mandiant has also provided the following additional recommendations for organizations to consider more generally:
- Establish a vendor vetting process to evaluate vendor security practices before deploying hardware or software.
- Create a change control process and board for all enterprise hardware and software changes, which could include a centralized IT or IT security managed process for downloading, testing, and pushing updates to users.
- Use an advanced endpoint security solution, such as an endpoint detection and response (EDR), to detect malicious behavior when a tainted software package is downloaded and executed.
- Ensure proper logging and monitoring is in place between the software, hardware, and the internet.
- Implement the software and hardware using network segmentation with minimal access to the internet.
- Enact employee training programs and policies to encourage security best practices, including security audits of code in development.
Next steps
You can watch the Google Cloud Security Talks presentation on SolarWinds and the current state of supply chain threats here. You can learn more about Google Cloud’s solutions to help improve software supply chain security here, or for more general inquiries, please contact us or reach out to your sales representative to learn how we can assist.
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Today’s security professionals face not only an ever-expanding list of threats, old and new, but also an excruciating choice of security approaches and tools.
Nearly 2000 security vendors are trying to sell to large enterprises and small businesses. Most organizations have already invested heavily in cybersecurity solutions. From firewalls to proxies and endpoint protection to DLP, the average firm has more than 40 types of security technologies in place, each generating telemetry that grows every year.
With employees, contractors, partners, and customers all accessing online business processes that were once hidden in a back office, corporate network traffic has also increased significantly. There is more noise than ever before, hiding more attacks than ever before — with greater impacts than ever before.
Security analytics promises to help analysts make sense of this data, to find useful signals in the noise before it’s too late.
For most organizations, however, an effective security analytics solution is an expensive and complex exercise in systems integration, with heavy IT operations support required simply to keep the system up and
running as it grows.
As CIOs migrate corporate IT to the cloud, CISOs roll out advanced threat protection such as EDR and network traffic analyzers to protect the pieces
that remain under their control.
In theory, a SIEM or centralized log management product consolidates and correlates all of this information, but in practice, SIEMs buckle under large data volumes.
Moreover, high-volume telemetry from EDR systems is rarely fed into a SIEM. If high volume telemetry is ingested, it’s typically only retained for a few weeks, if at all.
While it sounds counter-intuitive that we need another type of a tool, the world has changed dramatically and many existing security tools did not evolve fast enough to maintain relevance.
Today, organizations still operate legacy systems, have vast on-premise IT presence, but also a large cloud presence, often across multiple cloud providers. The types of security telemetry they collect expands,
and the volumes grow.
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