reCAPTCHA Keeps Unemployment Claims and COVID Vaccine Registration Portals Threat-free
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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.
Predicting Cyber Attacks: Security Command Center Introduces Attack Path Simulation
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To help secure increasingly complex and dynamic cloud environments, many security teams are turning to attack path analysis tools. These tools can enable them to better prioritize security findings and discover pathways that adversaries can exploit to access and compromise cloud assets such as virtual machines, databases, and storage buckets.
Other attack path tools rely on static, point-in-time snapshots of an organization’s cloud footprint, which often contain sensitive data about their environment, how it is configured, and where the most sensitive data resides.
At Google Cloud, we are taking a different approach. We are excited to announce today at the Google Cloud Security Summit that we are adding attack path simulation to Security Command Center, our built-in security and risk management solution for Google Cloud. This new risk management capability automatically analyzes a customer’s Google Cloud environment to pinpoint where and, importantly, how vulnerable resources may be attacked, so security teams can stay one step ahead of adversaries.
We expect attack path simulation capabilities to be available in Security Command Center Premium later this summer.
Unlike some third-party security products, Security Command Center continuously scans an organization’s cloud environment gathering near real-time data about cloud resources and security vulnerabilities. Our attack path simulation engine uses this information to automatically generate and render high-risk attack paths, without the hands-on toil of having to repeatedly run manual queries.
A different approach to attack path analysis
Other attack path analysis tools involve significant operational toil. The static, point-in-time snapshots that these tools generate have to be sent to an external provider, which can add risk. Then security teams have to follow up with complex queries before they can identify likely attack paths.
Google Cloud’s advanced attack simulation engine leverages our first-party, agentless visibility of Google Cloud assets, the relationships between assets, and the current state of defenses. Attack path simulation is fully automated with no need to manually run queries. Simulations run in the Google Cloud environment, and do not send snapshots outside your environment, avoiding exposure of sensitive information.
See what attackers can see
Effective attack path analysis should mimic how a real-world attacker can reach and compromise high value resources. This is why Security Command Center simulates how attackers try many different ways to infiltrate a cloud environment. SCC then generates attack path graphs to give defenders insight into how adversaries could exploit a single security weakness or various combinations of security vulnerabilities to access valuable assets. SCC also provides detailed information on how to remediate issues and shore up defenses based on its findings
We are delivering combined attack path simulation and analysis as a managed service. There are no agents to install or manage. Results automatically reflect changes in your organization’s Google Cloud environment. Because our attack path simulations are conducted on models of an organization’s cloud resources, there is no performance or operational impact to the live production environment.
Better security prioritization
Security Command Center automatically computes an attack exposure score for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that expose valuable resources to attackers. The score is a measure of cyber risk. It takes into account how exposed valued resources are, and the paths of least resistance for attackers to reach those resources.
Security teams can use these scores to prioritize remediation efforts and improve their overall risk posture.
How attack path analysis has already reduced risk for customers
Dozens of customers have already used our attack path capabilities in private Preview to improve their security posture and reduce their operational risk.
Security Command Center alerted one customer to a finding with a high attack exposure score. The finding was related to a service account whose keys were not being rotated. After reviewing the attack paths related to this finding, the cloud security manager discovered that even though the service account was named “test,” it provided access to storage buckets outside of the test environment.
If an attacker had been able to steal the credentials for this test account, they could have easily accessed production data. The security manager removed administrator privileges on the account. The attack path simulation enhanced their understanding of the severity of the finding, and helped convince them to make it a high-priority fix.
Another customer using attack path simulation needed to assess which security findings created the greatest risk. Two findings related to the same service account with high exposure scores rose to the top of the list. The attack paths revealed that the service account had access to more than 500 storage buckets. If an attacker were to gain access to this account they would be able to read, write, or delete data across any of those buckets, many of which contained sensitive business data and confidential customer information.
Using Security Command Center’s attack path results, the security team remediated the risk by limiting permissions to the storage buckets needed for that specific role.
Next steps
Attack path simulation capabilities are planned for availability later this summer. We expect forthcoming enhancements to use Security AI Workbench to translate complex attack graphs to human-readable explanations of attack exposure, including impacted assets and recommended mitigations.
You can learn more about Nordnet Bank’s experience using attack path simulation at our Security Summit session. To get started with Security Command Center today, please go to the Google Cloud console.
Cloud KMS with Cloud Storage: Better Performance for High-intensity Workloads
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Encryption is critical for securing sensitive data while it is stored and transits the cloud. Today, Cloud Storage encrypts data server-side with standard Google-managed encryption keys by default, and can also encrypt data with customer-managed encryption keys that are stored and managed by Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS).
While customers have been able to secure their data on Cloud Storage with Cloud KMS keys for some time, we are always updating our encryption offerings to deliver better performance, lower costs and more capabilities that support critical business workloads. In this post, we’ll discuss some of our latest developments in this space—in particular, performance improvements for high-intensity workloads and support for customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) for object composition.
Why use Cloud KMS with Cloud Storage?
Cloud KMS enables you to centrally manage your keys in a fast and scalable way that helps to meet your security and compliance needs. Cloud KMS generates customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) which act as an additional layer of protection on top of Google’s default encryption keys. You can set these keys on a Cloud Storage bucket as a default key, and can easily manage key rotation, replacement or disabling right within Cloud KMS.
In addition to software-based CMEKs, Cloud Storage also supports hardware-based CMEKs hosted in hardware security modules that are FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated as part of our Cloud HSM service. These enable you to protect your most sensitive workloads without needing to manage HSM cluster operations yourself.
Improving KMS performance for high-intensity workloads
While Cloud HSM is often used to protect the most sensitive data for a customer, especially for those in healthcare and financial services industries, the default quota limits for cryptographic operations on Cloud HSM keys may cause performance bottlenecks for customers aiming to run high-intensity workloads when using Cloud Storage, such as analytics workloads on Hadoop.
We are making improvements to the Cloud KMS request behaviour on Cloud Storage that more effectively batches requests to Cloud KMS to reduce request bandwidth and drive down KMS billing. Identical Cloud KMS requests from Cloud Storage will be batched together for newly written objects and across all supported encryption modes in Cloud KMS, including software-backed customer-managed encryption keys. As a result of these changes, when you are using Cloud KMS you may notice faster encrypt, read and write operations for new data, deduplicated Cloud KMS audit logs and lower overall Cloud KMS charges. Customers running high-intensity workloads should see a significant reduction in throughput to KMS, leading to a reduction in KMS cryptographic operation billing costs for all types of KMS keys, as well as enabling customers to scale the throughput of their HSM-encrypted workloads.
Newly written objects encrypted with Cloud KMS will leverage these changes, whether they are encrypted using software-backed or HSM-backed CMEKs, and no configuration change is needed. If you are looking to use Cloud KMS with Cloud Storage, check out the Cloud KMS page to learn more, especially for setting up a hardware-backed HSM.
Supporting Cloud KMS for object composition
Object composition in Cloud Storage is widely used today for different types of applications, from stitching video segments together for a replay to uploading large datasets for analytics workloads. As more and more customers are leveraging Cloud Storage for these applications, we are expanding object composition capabilities to be flexible across different encryption modes.
Object composition is now supported for customer-managed encryption keys in addition to Google-managed encryption keys and customer-supplied encryption keys. This allows you to manage your own encryption keys while performing object composition for business-critical needs such as compiling sensitive financial datasets.
To compose objects that are encrypted with customer-managed encryption keys, specify the resource name of the Cloud KMS key for encrypting the composed object as a query parameter in the compose request. For the JSON API, construct the following HTTP request, while specifying the Cloud KMS key resource name for the query parameter kmsKeyName.
POST https://storage.googleapis.com/storage/v1/b/bucket/o/destinationObject/compose
For the XML API, specify the Cloud KMS key resource name for the request header x-goog-encryption-kms-key-name. You can also specify a Cloud KMS key when using gsutil to perform object composition. Check out our documentation to try out object composition, or to start composing objects encrypted with customer-managed encryption keys.
Get started with better encryption
Being deliberate about encryption is critical for securing your sensitive data on Cloud Storage. Whether you are composing objects or running analytics workloads, leveraging the latest encryption offerings will deliver faster performance, better security and improved workload scalability. We’re always evolving our encryption products to meet your needs and help you achieve your business goals. To get started with encryption on Cloud Storage, check out our documentation to learn more.
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Why CISOs Need to Know This to Protect Users From Unsafe Websites
Unsafe web resources include social engineering sites—such as phishing and deceptive sites—and sites that host malware or unwanted software. For CISOs and their teams, this can quickly become an insurmountable challenge if it’s not nipped in the bud.
But there’s a way to enable companies to find unsafe URLs before their users do, identify phishing and deceptive sites, as well as sites that host malware or unwanted software.
Google Cloud’s Web Risk API was built to help admins protect users from unsafe websites. If a URL is known to be unsafe, Web Risk API responds with the threat type and the amount of time during which the website should be considered unsafe.
The Web Risk API can be integrated into both cloud-based and on-premises hosted applications and websites.
Watch this three-minute video to find out how Web Risk APIs can break the chain of malicious attacks and protect the data of your customers and users.
DueDil Chooses Apigee to Leverage APIs for Customers’ Risk Monitoring with Better Insights
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As their name reflects, DueDil provides due diligence services ranging from customer-specific risk evaluations and selections to customer onboarding and real-time risk monitoring for leading financial services, high-growth tech and insurance companies. Founded in 2009, the company helps more than 3,000 enterprise users from over 400 clients to not only understand with whom they’re doing business, but to do so with increased efficiency and in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Due diligence services have evolved in recent years, both because of new regulations and new technologies supplanting legacy systems and processes, many of which relied until recently on pen-and-paper workflows or exhaustive spreadsheet work. DueDil knew this technology transformation represented an opportunity to replace manual processes with automation–but it also recognized a second opportunity: to not merely process data but also activate it by connecting information in disparate IT systems and generating data-driven insights delivered at scale.
To capitalize on this opportunity, the company built its Business Information Graph, or B.I.G., a platform that maps approximately 300 million connections among companies. B.I.G. ingests billions of data points, and is refreshed multiple times per day, to surface unique insights about business’s relationships, such as fraud risks. The results that B.I.G. drives often speak for themselves: some DueDil customers onboard partners up to 80% faster, perform risk verification up to 18 times faster, and reduce time spent on manual portfolio checks by up to 80%.
What powers all of this transformation? Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
“From a go-to-market standpoint, our product is an API,” said Denis Dorval, DueDil COO, in a recent webcast, explaining that customers can directly tap B.I.G.’s resources for themselves, and build atop them for their own needs, via DueDil’s API.
Choosing an API management platform to deliver fast, secure, and scalable APIs
To execute on their vision of connecting B2B ecosystems for better insights and efficiency, DueDil looked for a cloud provider that could fulfill several specific criteria. They needed robust management for the APIs with which their internal developers leverage different systems for new use cases and process automations, as well as for the productized API they offer to customers. They needed sophisticated analytics and abundant processing power to crunch through billions of data points. And, they needed enterprise-grade security, scalability, and agility to underpin it all. Last but not least, the company prioritized a smooth transition; DueDil did not want the user experience to suffer as it switched providers.
“The stability of Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and the strength of its services stood out”, said DueDil’s Engineering Manager, Robert Cicero.
“Apigee is a resilient and agile platform, fulfilling our need to build APIs quickly, safely, and at scale,” he remarked, noting that he appreciated that many of Apigee’s API security defense tools and policies work out-of-the-box. For instance, Apigee’s JSON threat detection policies, custom policies, and authentication and authorization processes can be deployed instantly and add minimal latency, meaning DueDil can stop security threats before they enter its network while still avoiding the risk of service lags.
Today, DueDil has five internal services that facilitate business due diligence, all exposed via Apigee. They also use Apigee’s monetization feature to drive API consumption. This said, because DueDil’s go-to-market strategy is fast-paced and client-oriented, they most often use Apigee to rapidly prototype APIs for their clients, so they can understand what a specific API would look like and how it would behave. This allows DueDil, its partners, and its customers to spend more time delivering value from insights rather than getting bogged down in building backend systems.
Moreover, Apigee made it simpler to also connect to other Google Cloud services, such as BigQuery, Google Data Studio, and Google Cloud Storage. Apigee acts as a central nervous system among systems, giving DueDil not only the ability to connect systems and automate processes but also insight and visibility into how its B.I.G. services are being used by partners and customers.
Plus, added Cicero, “the migration to Apigee was seamless, with arguably our biggest win being that no one knew that we had switched API management providers to Apigee.”
Leveraging APIs to provide self-service while enforcing security and governance policies
Moving forward, DueDil plans to leverage Apigee to give staff members and clients more privileges, visibility, and opportunity to create and edit apps in a self-service manner, without needing to rely on an IT department or endure long approvals processes. Harnessing APIs to open up B.I.G. and other capabilities to more teams across the company will also allow DueDil to move faster and include more people in the innovation process. Leveraging Apigee API management capabilities, DueDil also intends to dive deeper and experiment with other Google Cloud products and services, including Cloud Function, Cloud Pub/Sub, and more.
“At the end of the day, every company goes about due diligence a little differently. The only way that we at DueDil are able to provide something that is configurable and dynamic to diverse businesses is if we use platforms that can adapt, too,” said Cicero. “Apigee gives us the agility required to create and deliver for a wide variety of businesses.”
Google Cloud, today, works across banking, capitalmarkets, insurance, and payments worldwide to solve their most challenging problems. Click here to learn more about how Google Cloud Apigee API management can help you design, secure, analyze, and scale APIs anywhere with visibility and control. To try Apigee API management for free, click here.
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Protecting a global network against persistent and constantly evolving cyber threats is one of the most important challenges faced by Google Cloud. So, how does Google’s global network protects seven different global businesses, each with over 1 billion customers, including popular Google services such as Google Search, YouTube, Maps, and Gmail?
The answer is a multi-step process, which is constantly changing and evolving to stay one step ahead of the malicious hackers and attackers. For instance, it’s network communications protocols—the rules that enable communications between systems—change multiple times per second to make malicious intrusions much harder.
Data in Google Cloud is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Google’s network capacity far exceeds any traffic load it hosts to thwart and DDoS attack. In addition, it has numerous other products, tools, and processes at work to provide defense in depth.
Download this e-book to get a detailed overview of Google Cloud’s approach to security and privacy.
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