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.

The financial services industry is changing—an estimated $68 trillion in wealth transferring from baby boomers to millennials.¹ This means financial service providers will have to deliver the speed, ease-of-use, technological sophistication, and tailored services that millennials have come to expect. In fact, half of all millennials are willing to switch to a competing institution if it offers a better digital experience.² This and many other trends are driving unprecedented growth for mobile Fintech experiences in banking, digital payments, financial management and insurance.³

Google Maps Platform financial services solutions

To help you respond to customer’s changing demands, we’re launching financial services solutions that can help you improve your customer experience, security and operations. We’ve outlined the technical guidance and APIs you need to build out three financial services solutions: Enriched Transactions, Quick and Verified Sign-up, and Branch and ATM Locator Plus. We’ve also highlighted two use cases that customers are using our APIs to solve: Contextual Experiences and Fraud Detection. 

Clarify financial statements with Enriched Transactions solution

Transaction statements are often hard for customers to understand, using abbreviations like “ACMEHCORP” instead of customer-facing names like “Acme Houseware”. Our Enriched Transactions solution clarifies these transactions and makes them instantly recognizable by adding the merchant name and business category, a photo of the storefront, its location on a map, and full contact info. Making transactions easier to recognize not only boosts consumer confidence, with reported increases in NPS of 15% or higher, but decreases costly support calls by approximately 67%.⁴

In addition, you can help customers easily visualize a series of transactions by adding the merchant name to the transaction amount and date, and displaying their transactions on a Google map. This enables you to give customers insights about where and how they spend money. See the guide to implement Enriched Transactions today.

Enable faster sign-up with Quick and Verified Sign-up solution

Manually entered addresses can lead to lowered conversions, erroneous customer data, and costly delivery mistakes. Our Quick and Verified Sign-up solution makes sign-up faster, suggesting nearby addresses with just a few thumb taps—cutting sign-up time by up to 64% and increasing conversion rates by up to 15%.⁵  

The solution also provides one additional level of address verification that helps reduce the risk of fraudulent account sign-ups—and companies have decreased fraudulent account setups by approximately 30% through using geospatial data to verify customer identities.⁴  See the Quick and Verified Sign-up solution guide to get started today.

• Faster sign-ups 1An application form requires an address
• Faster sign-ups 2Autocomplete quickly suggests addresses
• Faster sign-ups 3Select the address with visual confirmation
• Faster sign-ups 4Address verification options are presented
• Faster sign-ups 5Location permission is granted by the user
• Faster sign-ups 6The address is verified

Help customers visit you with Branch and ATM Locator Plus solution

74% of customers now search for specific details prior to their visit, which makes detailed, accurate profiles for each location a must.⁵ Our Branch and ATM Locator Plus solution enhances your own websites and apps with the same information shown about your branches and ATMs on Google Maps. Include hours of operation, available services, user reviews, photos of the location, driving directions and more.

Financial services companies using geospatial data to provide additional information (e.g. opening hours, available services, etc.) on branch and ATM services have seen a 14% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS), and a 7% decrease in customer support calls.⁴  Implement Branch and ATM Locator Plus today using the guide or build it in minutes with Quick Builder.

• ATM locator 1Customers can enable location permissions, or enter their address
• ATM locator 2Quickly enter the address with Autocomplete
• ATM locator 3Nearby location listings, ranked by distance and ETA
• ATM locator 4Map view and directions

Enable offers and rewards with Contextual Experiences                    

Real-time, geo-targeted offers can power deals, rewards, and cash-back programs—all visualized with rich Google Maps. By combining the insights of purchase histories with customer opt-in to location-based features, companies can implement the Contextual Experiences use case to enable personalized offers and rewards programs that drive engagement with brands while putting money in customers’ pockets at the same time.This is a win for banks and their customers, validated by encouraging metrics like NPS rating boosts of 8% or higher, and an increase of 8% or more time spent in-app.⁴  Learn how Current uses Google Maps Platform to create innovative customer rewards programs with location intelligence.

Detect suspicious transactions with Fraud Detection

With the Fraud Detection use case, companies can use customer opted-in mobile device location to flag suspicious activity based on geographic distance, such as an ATM withdrawal that is far from the customer’s phone. Our APIs can also help companies recognize suspicious transaction patterns such as a purchase made at a location that is physically distant from a recent transaction. 

Financial services companies that use geospatial data to verify customers’ identities have reduced fraudulent transactions by approximately 70%, and false positives in fraud detection by 45%, on average.⁴  Learn how Starling Bank uses Google Maps Platform to enable real-time notification of transactions and their locations, and enhance data-driven decision-making.

Start elevating customer experiences, reducing risk and increasing efficiency today with our financial services offerings. Visit our financial services solutions page to learn more about how to start implementing these solutions.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Twenty years ago, organizations discovered the magic of server virtualization. Among the many benefits of virtualization, it heralded the end of the need for one physical server per application and the beginning of managing software-defined infrastructure. It helped automate building and installing systems, and it helped lay foundations for today’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery mechanisms and DevOps practices. However, the adoption of virtualization was not always smooth and several hurdles stood in its path. Today’s organizations are facing similar obstacles in their journey to the cloud.

Organizations that wanted to virtualize their server environment two decades ago faced a significant challenge that was neither technical nor budgetary, but organizational, stretching across IT teams and beyond. The first team to be concerned about virtualization was the one in charge of installing the physical servers in the racks of the datacenter, managing the physical network connections and operating environmental controls, such as HVAC and power systems. These tasks were drastically reduced, if not outright eliminated.

The second team affected by this shift in technology was the one responsible for installing the operating system and running the post-install procedures. Their job almost completely disappeared as most virtual machines were automatically instantiated from templates.

As a result, successful adoption relied on the ability to smooth these organizational changes. Along the way, training the staff and making sure they acquire the new skills necessary to operate the virtualization infrastructure was critical. And usually, the affected teams eventually found that their new responsibilities were different but still essential to the organization, and perhaps even more appealing.

Virtualizations lessons for cloud transformation regulators

Discussions on virtualization didn’t end with these internal changes when organizations were operating in a regulated environment. They needed to engage closely with their regulators. Regulated organizations often considered the hypervisor solely as an additional layer of software with potential vulnerabilities.

This viewpoint raised risks (such as virtual machine escape) that didn’t exist with physical servers. Even if this is taken into account and the risks mitigated, it should have been considered in balance with all the benefits of machine virtualization, including security benefits such as asset identification, harmonization, and smoother patch management.

While the relevance and benefits of virtualization are now widely accepted, history has repeated itself as similar issues have arisen for organizations facing cloud migrations. When large cloud service providers (CSP) began supporting critical workloads for their customers, regulators increased their oversight over CSPs and issued guidance concerning cloud adoption. This happened in the European financial sector, with guidelines from the European Supervisory Authorities (European Banking Authority, European Securities and Market Authority and European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority,) and the coming Digital Operational Resilience Act regulation.

These regulations can help establish trust between providers and customers. As regulator decisions are vital for organizations, there is an opportunity now with cloud technology to balance the risks with the benefits and take into consideration all the ways CSPs can help organizations improve their overall security and compliance levels.

Cultural transformation can drive cloud transformation

Another similarity between cloud transformation and the journey to virtualization is the required internal transformation. When an organization decides to start its journey to the cloud, training its staff with the new technology and tools is a necessary step, but probably not the first nor the most arduous to make. A change of mindset is paramount to fully incorporate all the cloud benefits, in particular regarding security.

This new approach begins with a deep transformation at the organizational level. Organizations should avoid viewing the cloud as a datacenter because there’s so much more potential to cloud technology. This new approach and its accompanying organizational transformation is driven by two factors: The burdens that the CSP removes from the customer, and the new flexibility that software-defined infrastructure brings to the table.

The CSP directly manages several tasks and services, and their security, which means that they’re no longer a direct concern for the customer. These responsibilities include data center management, security-hardened hardware, default encryption for data at rest and data in transit, and resilient network management.

Since all the infrastructure used by the organization to manage its workloads is software defined, it brings much more flexibility to what can be done with it. Software-defined infrastructure can more easily enable security guardrails and continuous compliance that weren’t possible before.

While there’s a temptation to approach an organization’s cloud transformation as merely a “lift and shift” operation from on-premises infrastructure, the reality is that approach reduces the potential gains a cloud transformation can bring to an organization. Moving systems to the cloud accounts for a small portion of the potential impact, while updating the mindset can be truly transformational. Development, architecture and security processes need to be rebuilt; this inevitably requires a deeper transformation of the organization.

The next step is to transform the operations, to align them with the overall organization and the new defined processes, operationalize CI/CD and build DevOps practices. After that, the technological gap will be adjusted, moving the new tools and teaching teams how to best use them.

The important point here is the order of the transformation to manage: organization, operations and technologies (O-O-T) and not the other way round (T-O-O). Of course, these three steps should not be considered completely sequential, as technology plays an important role in the organization and the operations. However, it is essential to support the development of personnel and frameworks to take full advantage of the transformation opportunity, rather than primarily focusing on the tooling.

In addition, at Google Cloud, we believe in a shared fate that goes far beyond the usual shared responsibility model. We think it is part of our duty to help our customers to achieve their goals in their scope of responsibility. We prepare secure landing zones and guide the customers, we bring transparency to security controls and help them with cyber-insurance.

Our shared objective with our customers is to continuously improve security. Our Google Cybersecurity Action Team initiative helps us to be engaged alongside our customers, provide them with necessary guidance, support them in their security and compliance strategies, and assist their organizational and operational transformation in their cloud journey.

• Listen to a related podcast “How to Apply Lessons from Virtualization Transition to Make Cloud Transformation Better”
• Listen to “Preparing for Cloud Migrations from a CISO Perspective, Part 1”
• Read “The journey to the cloud mitigates enterprise risk”
• Also, review “Megatrends drive cloud adoption—and improve security for all”
• Visit Google Cybersecurity Action Team website

A critical component of any security operations team’s job is to deliver high-fidelity detections of potential threats across the breadth of adversary tactics. But increasingly sophisticated threat actors, an expanding attack surface, and an ever-present cybersecurity talent shortage make this task more challenging than ever.

Google keeps more people safe online than anyone else. Individuals, businesses and governments globally depend on our products that are secure-by-design and secure-by-default. Part of the “magic” behind Google’s security is the sheer scale of threat intelligence we are able to derive from our billions of users, browsers, and devices.

Today, we are putting the power of Google’s intelligence in the hands of security operations teams. We are thrilled to announce the general availability of curated detections as part of our Chronicle SecOps Suite. These detections are built by our Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) team, and are actively maintained to reduce manual toil in your team.

Our detections provide security teams with high quality, actionable, out-of-the-box threat detection content curated, built and maintained by Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) researchers. Our scale, and depth of intelligence, gained by securing billions of users everyday, gives us a unique vantage point to craft effective and targeted detections. These native detection sets cover a wide variety of threats for cloud and beyond, including Windows-based attacks like ransomware, remote-access tools (RAT), infostealers, data exfiltration, suspicious activity, and weakened configurations.

With this launch, security teams can smoothly leverage Google’s expertise and unique visibility into the threat landscape. This release helps understaffed and overstressed security teams keep up with an ever evolving threat landscape, quickly identify threats, and drive effective investigation and response. With this new release, security teams can:

• Enable high quality curated detections with a single click from within the Chronicle console.
• Operationalize data with high-fidelity threat detections, stitched with context available from authoritative sources (such as IAM and CMDB).
• Accelerate investigation and response by finding anomalistic assets and domains with prevalence visualization for the detections triggered.
• Map detection coverage to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to better understand adversary tactics and techniques and uncover potential gaps in defenses.

Detections are constantly updated and refined by GCTI researchers based on the evolving threat landscape. The first release of curated detections includes two categories that cover a broad range of threats, including:

• Windows-based threats: Coverage for several classes of threats including infostealers, ransomware, RATs, misused software, and crypto activity.
• Cloud attacks and cloud misconfigurations: Secure cloud workloads with additional coverage around exfiltration of data, suspicious behavior, and additional vectors.

Let’s look at an example of how you can put curated detections to work within the Chronicle dashboard, monitor coverage, and map to MITRE ATT&CK®.

An analyst can learn more details around specific detections and understand how they map to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. There are customized settings to configure deployment and alerting, and specify exceptions via reference lists.

You can see each rule which has generated a detection against your log data in the Chronicle rules dashboard. You can observe detections associated with the rule and pivot to investigative views. For example, here is the detection view from the timeline of an Empire Powershell Stager launch triggered by the Windows RAT rule set. You can also easily pivot to associated information and investigate the asset on which it was triggered.

By surfacing impactful, high-efficacy detections, Chronicle can enable analysts to spend time responding to actual threats and reduce alert fatigue. Our customers who used curated detections during our public preview were able to detect malicious activity and take actions to prevent threats earlier in their lifecycle. And there’s more to come. We will be delivering a steady release of new detection categories covering a wide variety of threats, community-driven content, and other out-of-the-box analytics.

Ready to put Google’s intelligence 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.

As sophisticated cyberattack campaigns increasingly target the U.S. public and private sectors during the COVID era, the White House and federal agencies have taken steps to protect critical infrastructure and remote-work infrastructure. These include Executive Order 14028 and the Office of Management and Budget’s Memorandum M-21-31, which recommend adopting Zero Trust policies, and span software supply chain security, cybersecurity threat management, and strengthening cyberattack detection and response.

However, implementation can be a challenge for many agencies due to cost, scalability, engineering, and a lack of resources. Meeting the requirements of the EO and OMB guidance may require technology modernization and transformational changes around workforce and business processes.

Today we are announcing Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) for the U.S. public sector, a solution framework to modernize cybersecurity analytics and threat management that’s aligned with the objectives of EO 14028 and OMB M-21-31. Powered by Google’s Chronicle and Siemplify, ASO helps agencies to comprehensively manage cybersecurity telemetry across an organization, meet the Event Logging Tier requirements of the White House guidance, and transform the scale and speed of threat detection and response. ASO can support government agencies in achieving continuous detection and continuous response so that security teams can increase their productivity, reduce detection and response time, and keep pace with – or ideally, stay ahead of – attackers.

While the focus of OMB M-21-31 is on the implementation of technical capabilities, transforming security operations will require more than just technology. Transforming processes and people in the security organization is also important for long-term success. ASO provides a more comprehensive lens through which to view the OMB event logging capability tiers, which can help drive a parallel transformation of security-operations processes and personnel.

Modern Cybersecurity Threat Detection and Response

Google provides powerful technical capabilities to help your organization achieve the requirements of M-21-31 and EO 14028:

Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) – Chronicle provides high-speed petabyte-scale analysis, and is capable of consuming log types outlined in the Event Logging (EL) tiers in a highly cost-effective manner.

Security Orchestration, Analytics, and Response (SOAR) – Siemplify offers dozens of out-of-box playbooks to deliver agile cybersecurity response and drive mission impact, including instances of automating 98% of Tier-1 alerts and driving an 80% reduction in caseload.

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) – For agencies that want to develop their own behavioral analytics, agencies can use BigQuery, Google’s petabyte scale data lake, to store, manage, and analyze diverse data types from many sources. Telemetry can be exported out of Chronicle, and custom data pipelines can be built to import other relevant data from disparate tools and systems, such as IT Ops, HR and personnel data, and physical security data. From there, users can leverage BQML to readily generate machine learning models without needing to move the data out of BigQuery. For Google Cloud workloads, our Security Command Center Premium product offers native, turnkey UEBA across GCP workloads.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) – For most agencies, EDR is a heavily adopted technology that has broad applicability in Security Operations. We offer integrations to many EDR vendors. Take a look at our broad list of Chronicle integrations here.

Threat intelligence – Our solution offers a native integration with VirusTotal, has the ability to operationalize threat intelligence feeds natively in Chronicle, and integrates with various TI and TIP solutions.

Community Security Analytics

To increase collaboration across public-sector and private-sector organizations, we recently launched our Community Security Analytics (CSA) repository, where we’ve partnered with the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense, CYDERES, and others to develop open-source queries and rules that support self-service security analytics for detecting common cloud-based security threats. CSA queries are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to help you evaluate their applicability in your environment and include them in your threat model coverage.

“Deloitte is excited to collaborate with Google Cloud on their transformational public sector Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) solution offering. Deloitte has been recognized as Google Cloud’s Global Services Partner of the Year for four consecutive years, and also as their inaugural Public Sector Partner of the Year in 2020,” said Chris Weggeman, managing director of GPS Cyber and Strategic Risk, Google Cloud Cyber Alliance Leader, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Our deep bench of more than 1,000 Google Cloud certifications, capabilities spanning the Google Cloud security portfolio, and decades of delivery experience in the government and public sector makes us well-positioned to help our clients undertake critical Security Operations Center transformation efforts with Google Cloud ASO.”

Cost-effective for government agencies

To help Federal Agencies meet the requirements of M-21-31 and the broader EO, Google’s ASO solutions can drive efficiencies and help manage the overall costs of the transformation. ASO can make petabyte-scale data ingestion and management more viable and cost-effective. This is critical at a time when M-21-31 is requiring many agencies to ingest and manage dramatically higher volumes of data that had not been previously budgeted for.

Partners

We’re investing in key partners who can help support U.S. government agencies on this journey. Deloitte and CYDERES both have deep expertise to help transform agencies’ Security Operations capabilities, and we continue to expand our partners to support the needs of our clients. A prototypical journey can be seen below.

“Cyderes shares Google Cloud’s mission to transform security operations, and we are honored to deliver the Autonomic Security Operations solution to the U.S. public sector. As the number one MSSP in the world (according to Cyber Defense Magazine’s 2021 Top MSSPs List) with decades of advisory and technology experience detecting and responding to the world’s biggest cybersecurity threats, Cyderes is uniquely positioned to equip federal agencies and departments to go far beyond the requirements of the executive order to transform their security programs entirely via Google’s unique ASO approach,” said Robert Herjavec, CEO of CYDERES. “As an original launch partner of Google Cloud’s Chronicle, our deep expertise will propel our joint offering to modernize security operations in the public sector, all with significant cost efficiency compared to competing solutions.” said Eric Foster, President of CYDERES.

Embracing ASO

Autonomic Security Operations can help U.S. government agencies advance their event logging capabilities in alignment with OMB maturity tiers. More broadly, ASO can help the U.S. government undertake a larger transformation of technology, process, and people, toward a model of continuous threat detection and response. As such, we believe that ASO can help address a number of challenges presently facing cybersecurity teams, from the global shortage of skilled workers, to the overproliferation of security tools, to poor cybersecurity situational awareness and analyst burnout caused by an increase of data without sufficient context or tools to automate and scale detection and response.

We believe that by embracing ASO, agencies can help agencies achieve:

10x technology, through the use of cloud-native tools that help agencies meet event logging requirements in the near term, while powering a longer-term transformation in threat management;

10x process, by redesigning workflows and using automation to achieve Continuous Detection and Continuous Response in security operations;

10x people, by transforming the productivity and effectiveness of security teams and expanding their diversity; and

10x influence across the enterprise through a more collaborative and data-driven approach to solving security problems between security teams and non-security stakeholders.

To learn more about Google’s Autonomic Security Operations solution for the U.S. public sector, please read our whitepaper. More broadly, Google Cloud continues to provide leadership and support for a wide range of critical public-sector initiatives, including our work with the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense, the membership of Google executives on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the newly established Cyber Safety Review Board; Google’s White House commitment to invest $10 billion in Zero Trust and software supply chain security, and Google Cloud’s introduction of a framework for software supply chain integrity. We look forward to working with the U.S. government to make the nation more secure.

Visit our Google Cloud for U.S. federal cybersecurity webpage.

Related posts:

Autonomic Security Operations for the U.S. Public Sector Whitepaper

“Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil”

“Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Automation as a Force Multiplier”

“Advancing Autonomic Security Operations: New resources for your modernization journey”