At Google Cloud, we are committed to advancing invisible security and democratizing security operations for every organization. Today, we’re proud to share the next step in this journey with the acquisition of Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. Siemplify shares our vision in this space, and will join Google Cloud’s security team to help companies better manage their threat response.

In a time when cyberattacks are rapidly growing in both frequency and sophistication, there’s never been a better time to bring these two companies together. We both share the belief that security analysts need to be able to solve more incidents with greater complexity while requiring less effort and less specialized knowledge. With Siemplify, we will change the rules on how organizations hunt, detect, and respond to threats.

Providing a proven SOAR capability unified with Chronicle’s innovative approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision. Building an intuitive, efficient security operations workflow around planet-scale security telemetry will further realize Google Cloud’s vision of a modern threat management stack that empowers customers to go beyond typical security event and information management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) tooling, enabling better detection and response at the speed and scale of modern environments. 

“We’re excited to join Google Cloud and build on the success we’ve had in the market helping companies address growing security threats,” said Amos Stern, CEO at Siemplify. “Together with Chronicle’s rich security analytics and threat intelligence, we can truly help security professionals transform the security operations center to defend against today’s threats.”

The Siemplify platform is an intuitive workbench that enables security teams to both manage risk better and reduce the cost of addressing threats. Siemplify allows Security Operation Center analysts to manage their operations from end-to-end, respond to cyber threats with speed and precision, and get smarter with every analyst interaction. The technology also helps improve SOC performance by reducing caseloads, raising analyst productivity, and creating better visibility across workflows.

We plan to invest in SOAR capabilities with Siemplify’s cloud services as our foundation and the team’s talent leading the way. Our intention is to integrate Siemplify’s capabilities into Chronicle in ways that help enterprises modernize and automate their security operations. 

We’re looking forward to welcoming the Siemplify team to Google Cloud and working with them to help security operations teams accomplish so much more in defense of their organizations. You can read Siemplify CEO Amos Stern’s blog for more on this exciting news.

As cloud adoption continues to grow, so too does the number of cloud-born security threats. However, cloud environments can present significant opportunities to improve security with the right tools and processes in place.

When it comes to effective threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) in the cloud, modern solutions must ensure that the entire security operations workflow — from data analysis through detection to response — are working in tandem to deliver the insights, context, and processes needed for cyber defenders to respond to threats with speed and precision. 

At Google Cloud, we believe that modern security operations should rely less on customer engineering and more on packaged outcomes delivered by solution providers. With this in mind, we are excited to announce today at our annual Security Summit that Chronicle Security Operations now provides turnkey TDIR for Google Cloud. By integrating with our cloud-focused Security Command Center Premium (SCC) and Google Cloud telemetry, Chronicle can collect and analyze data from Google Cloud, detect and investigate threats, and automate responses to mitigate risks.

In our recent State of Cloud Threat Detection and Response Survey, 71% of respondents said that “entire classes of threats are eliminated by migrating to the cloud,” and 82% stated that “the cloud affords the ability to process more data, including on-prem data, which can improve detection across the board.” 

To take advantage of all that the cloud can do for security, organizations should to do more than “lift and shift” their existing security tools and processes to the cloud. The cloud presents a different attack surface, often across several cloud services and data repositories, and each can have different attack tactics, potential misconfigurations, and context.  

This update to Chronicle helps enable teams to:

• Detect with confidence. Out-of-the-box detection rule sets developed by Google threat researchers surface cloud attack vectors and provide high fidelity, contextualized alerts that quickly give insight into potential threats in your Google Cloud environment. 
• Investigate with full context. Visualize threat storylines, complete with cloud-specific context that is correlated with additional data and context from across your environment for fast and efficient investigations.
• Respond with speed and precision. Streamline workflows and automate response actions with prebuilt playbooks and best practices designed specifically for Google Cloud. Chronicle SOAR’s case management and team collaboration help ensure fast and timely response.
• Simplify data ingestion. Chronicle automatically ingests, normalizes and contextualizes cloud telemetry from a variety of Google Cloud services (such as Cloud Asset Inventory, Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, cloud audit logs, and Cloud DLP), reducing the need for complex and time-consuming engineering.

Putting Google Cloud TDIR to work 

Let’s take a closer look at how our end-to-end cloud TDIR workflow manages a potential Google Cloud attack. 

Setting up cloud TDIR in Chronicle only takes a few clicks. Security Command Center’s built-in threat detection identifies attacks against Google Cloud resources. These findings, as well as audit, NAT, DNS, and firewall logs, are ingested into Chronicle to provide additional insight and context into Google Cloud threats.

Chronicle now provides detection rules for Google Cloud threats. These rules correlate SCC findings with Chronicle’s advanced detection engine to reveal the broad scope of malicious activity, giving you visibility and more contextual information into what’s going on in your environment. In our example, Chronicle alerts on suspicious activity that can indicate an attempt to exfiltrate data from BigQuery.

The new Chronicle Alert Graph surfaces key details of primary alerts you’re investigating in seconds. Combining cloud alerts and telemetry and correlating that with vital context from other sources (such as user data, endpoint data, and threat intelligence,) you can explore the visual representation of an alert’s relationship to other alerts and entities, dig into the potential attack paths, get quick summaries of implicated security artifacts, and pivot into your Google Cloud Console to do a deeper dive into potentially-impacted resources.  

In our example, we can see a BigQuery exfiltration event associated with a customer and that it’s associated with a particular service account tied to a Google Cloud org. Alert context below tells us more about what’s been impacted. It shows us that cloud credentials in the form of encryption keys and email addresses were associated with the event.

Chronicle case management automatically groups any related alerts into threat-centric cases, uniting the information that matters and making it simple for you to see and understand the scope of the event. 

In our example, Chronicle groups these alerts together based on common source address and username, and the case wall provides the summary of the alerts and actions that are taking place across the entire case.

Chronicle playbooks, designed specifically for Google Cloud, automate your desired response processes. In our example, when an alert was generated a playbook automatically ran through predefined steps that gathered data, enrichment, and took automated remediation steps to prevent this service account and instance from continuing.

Ready to detect with confidence, investigate with broad context, respond with speed and precision, and simplify data ingestion? Chronicle Security Operations is your go-to for turnkey, end-to-end threat detection, investigation, and response on Google Cloud.    

Tune in to our Security Summit session to learn more and see a demo of the new Google Cloud TDIR capabilities.

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.

Businesses that operate in complex cloud environments, large fleets, or sophisticated security operations all require visibility into their cloud assets in order to keep their teams nimble and their data secure. Cloud Asset Inventory (CAI) helps these teams understand their Google Cloud  and Anthos environments by providing complete visibility, real-time monitoring, and powerful asset analysis capabilities. Today, Cloud Asset Inventory gets four new capabilities that help you understand your environment more clearly and easily than ever before.

New user interface eases asset and insight discovery 

Cloud Asset Inventory console preview is now publicly available for GCP and Anthos customers. This preview provides insights into your cloud footprint, history and details of resource usage with powerful filtering and search capabilities. For example, you can view your global distribution of resources and policies, how your GCE VM footprint has been changing over time, as well as full metadata and change history for all your assets. The CAI console can be filtered at the organization, folder, or project-level, so each user can view the resources they have permissions for down to project level granularity.

Asset discovery and Datadog integration

A new asset list service in CAI provides quick and comprehensive asset discovery, including asset history, without needing to export the data to a storage destination. Datadog, a leading multi-cloud monitoring and security service provider, relies on deep integration with CAI for service and asset discovery. Datadog has been piloting and taking full advantage of the newly released asset list service. Datadog Product Manager, Steve Harrington, commented: 

“Google’s new Cloud Asset Inventory API provides us with an immensely valuable, single source of truth for determining the resources present in a given GCP environment. Along with its rich metadata, this enables us to enhance multiple aspects of our integration with GCP, including streamlined metric collection and ingestion of custom labels. We plan to continue building around Cloud Asset Inventory in the future to improve existing features, and are envisioning ways it could help us provide entirely new insights to our customers.”

Answer “who can access what resources?”

Determining authoritative answers to security-related questions like “Who can read data from my storage bucket that contains PII?” or “Does a terminated employee still have any remaining access to my system?” can be difficult and time consuming. This is why access management and identity certification is one of the top security priorities for enterprises running workloads in the cloud. To help alleviate this challenge, the new Policy Analyzer capability in CAI thoroughly analyzes the relationship between IAM policies and resources. The analysis includes powerful and efficient group expansion, service account impersonation, conditional access analysis, resource expansion, and more. You can even export the results to a BigQuery table or Cloud Storage bucket for further analysis and record keeping. CAI’s enhanced UI makes it even easier for you to build your own flexible queries and quickly get to a comprehensive answer.

Create asset posture visibility 

Cloud Asset Inventory now provides seven types of Asset Insights through the Active Assist platform. These new asset insights help proactively detect anomalies within your organization’s IAM policies, which may be opportunities to improve your security posture. The insights can be aggregated at the Organization, Folder or Project level. 

The seven new Asset Insights include: 

• External members in IAM policies. 
• External users that impersonate your service accounts.
• External members as policy editors.
• External users who can view cloud storage buckets.
• Terminated users/groups that are still in IAM policies
• IAM policies containing all users or all authenticated users.
• Projects with only terminated users as owners.

As a Google Cloud customer you can get started and use all the recently released capabilities and features immediately; check out our documentation to see how. We’d love to hear your feedback; email us with any questions or concerns!