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.

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.

Whether they were ready for it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed many retailers into digital businesses. Retailers made huge investments into commerce technologies, customer experience tools, sales and fulfillment technology, and improving digital experiences to continue providing their goods and services to their customers. Now, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, digital retail is the new normal. In fact, many retailers are planning on expanding their digital investments. However, as their digital footprint expands, so do their threats and security concerns. 

As a digital-focused retailer, your website is the most visible part of your attack surface. Your website is where your customers search for goods or services, make payments, or learn more about your brand. However, your website does not operate in isolation. There is an underlying infrastructure as well as the services that run on top of it that need protection from a wide array of attacks that may seek to compromise your data, internal employees, business, and customers. During this week’s Google Cloud Retail Summit, we’ve shared why Google Cloud is built to be the most trusted cloud for retailers. From providing you with control over your data as you move from your own data centers to the public cloud to giving you built-in technology to protect your applications all the way to your end users, Google Cloud helps you safely migrate to and operate in our Trusted Cloud.

Trusted Cloud Gives You Control, Transparency, and Sovereignty

• Access Transparency: We offer the ability to monitor and approve access to your data or configurations by Google Cloud support and engineering based on specific justifications and context, so you have visibility and control over insider access. 
• Certificate Authority Service (CAS): CAS is a highly scalable and available service that simplifies and automates the management and deployment of private CAs while meeting the needs of modern developers and applications. With CAS, you can offload to the cloud time-consuming tasks associated with operating a private CA, like hardware provisioning, infrastructure security, software deployment, high-availability configuration, disaster recovery, backups, and more, allowing you to stand up a private CA in minutes, rather than the months it might normally take to deploy.

• Confidential Computing: We already encrypt data at-rest and in-transit, but customer data needs to be decrypted for processing. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use—while it’s being processed. Confidential VMs take this technology to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. With the beta launch of Confidential VMs, we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this level of security and isolation while giving you a simple, easy-to-use option for your newly built and “lift and shift” applications.

• Cloud Key Management: We allow you to configure the locations where your data is stored, where your encryption keys are stored, and where your data can be accessed from. We give you the ability to manage your own encryption keys, even storing them outside Google’s infrastructure. Using our External Key Management service, you have the ability to deny any request by Google to access encryption keys necessary to decrypt customer data at rest for any reason.

Trusted cloud Helps You Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Threats

• BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering. Google has over a decade of experience managing and securing cloud applications at a global scale, and this offering was developed based on learnings from our experience managing our own enterprise, feedback from customers and partners, as well as informed by leading engineering and security research. We understand that most customers host resources across different cloud providers. With this in mind, BeyondCorp Enterprise was purpose-built as a multicloud solution, enabling customers to securely access resources hosted not only on Google Cloud or on-premises, but also across other clouds such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Cloud Armor: We’re simplifying how you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, you will get access to DDoS and WAF services, curated rule sets, and other services for a predictable monthly price.

• Chronicle: Chronicle is a threat detection solution that identifies threats, including ransomware, at unparalleled speed and scale. Google Cloud Threat Intelligence for Chronicle surfaces highly actionable threats based on Google’s collective insight and research into Internet-based threats. Threat Intel for Chronicle allows you to focus on real threats in the environment and accelerate your response time.
• Google Workspace Security: Used by more than five million organizations worldwide, from large banks and retailers with hundreds of thousands of people to fast-growing startups, Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education include the collaboration and productivity tools found here. Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are designed to help teams work together securely in new, more efficient ways, no matter where members are located or what device they use. For instance, Gmail scans over 300 billion attachments for malware every week and prevents more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching users. We’re committed to protecting against security 1 threats of all kinds, innovating new security tools for users and admins, and providing our customers with a secure cloud service.
• Identity & Access Management IAM: Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally. For enterprises with complex organizational structures, hundreds of workgroups, and many projects, IAM provides a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.
• reCAPTCHA Enterprise: reCAPTCHA has over a decade of experience defending the internet and data for its network of more than 5 million sites. reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds on this technology with capabilities, such as two-factor authentication and mobile application support, designed specifically for enterprise security concerns. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise, you can defend your website against common web-based attacks like credential stuffing, account takeovers, and scraping and help prevent costly exploits from malicious human and automated actors. And, just like reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA Enterprise will never interrupt your users with a challenge, so you can run it on all webpages where your customers interact with your services.

• Security Command Center: With Security Command Center (SCC), our native posture management platform, you can prevent and detect abuse of your cloud resources, centralize security findings from Google Cloud services and partner products, and detect common misconfigurations, all in one easy-to-use platform. We have Premium tier for Security Command Center to provide even more tools to protect your cloud resources. It adds new capabilities that let you spot threats using Google intelligence for events in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) logs and containers, surface large sets of misconfigurations, perform automated compliance scanning and reporting. These features help you understand your risks on Google Cloud, verify that you’ve configured your resources properly and safely, and document it for anyone who asks.

• VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. Any user can select a file from their computer using their browser and send it to VirusTotal.
• Web Risk API: With Web Risk, you can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining billions of URLs each day.

Trusted cloud Plays an Active Role in Our Shared Fate 

Our trusted cloud provides a shared-fate model for risk management. We stand with retailers from day one, helping them implement best practices for safely migrating to and operating in our trusted cloud.

We hope you enjoy the sessions we’ve created for you with Google Cloud Retail Summit and that they help you understand the ways our trusted cloud can help secure retailers all over the world.

In every industry, in every part of the world, cybersecurity concerns continue to grow in the wake of attacks on critical infrastructure and the software supply chain. Governments and businesses of all sizes recognize that they must do more to protect their employees, customers and citizens. 

But doing more of the same, like putting security band-aids on legacy infrastructure, is no longer helpful or productive. We need an enduring commitment, in products, people and monetary terms, to drive meaningful improvements in our collective security posture. Google recently announced a $10 billion investment to advance the security of governments around the world, and by extension, help enterprises and organizations to do the same. 

Over the past year, Google Cloud has been delivering on our vision of Invisible Security for our customers, where capabilities are continuously engineered into both our trusted cloud platform and market-leading products to bring the best of Google’s security to wherever your IT assets are. But being a provider of best-in-class technology is not enough. We want to share our expertise to help organizations with their security transformation and offer even more ways to accelerate these essential improvements. This week, at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we’re sharing the first of what will be many more steps in advancing these efforts.

Introducing our Cybersecurity Action Team

While access to the latest, most advanced security technology is important, the expertise of what it will take to become resilient in the face of today’s risk and threat environment is foundational.  

Today, we’re announcing the formation of the Google Cybersecurity Action Team. The Google Cybersecurity Action Team marshals experts from across Google to form what we believe will be the world’s premier security advisory team. It has a singular mission to support the security and digital transformation of governments, critical infrastructure, enterprises and small businesses.

Building on existing security solutions engineering efforts, today the Google Cybersecurity Action Team announced a security and resilience framework that delivers a roadmap for a comprehensive security management program aligned with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework using cloud technologies from Google Cloud and our partners. 

“Google Cloud has been a critical partner in the BBVA security journey, helping us protect our customers’ sensitive and proprietary data with modern frameworks like zero trust and secure-by-default products like Google Workspace,” said Alvaro Garrido, Chief Security Officer at BBVA. “We look forward to the strategic services and guidance the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will deliver as we continue on our security transformation.”

Learn more about the Cybersecurity Action Team here. 

Announcing a safer way to work

Bringing you the expertise and hands-on guidance to help with your security transformation is just one valuable step. We recognize that too many organizations can’t wait any longer to begin their modernization efforts – they need a new baseline, and they need it now. 

That’s why today, we’re announcing the launch of our Google Work Safer offering, designed to help organizations, their employees, and partners collaborate and communicate securely and privately in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer provides companies with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with BeyondCorp Enterprise for secure access with integrated threat and data protection. For customers who want secure devices, Work Safer includes Pixel phones managed with Android Enterprise, Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, and HP Chromebooks. Customers can also leverage Google’s Titan Security Keys for account protection, reCAPTCHA Enterprise for website fraud prevention, Chronicle for security analytics, and a variety of migration services for a seamless transition.

The program is designed to meet the needs of all organizations, including small businesses, enterprises and public sector institutions, many of which are reliant on legacy technology and often lack expertise to fully address rising security challenges associated with hybrid work. To learn more, visit our Work Safer homepage. 

Advancing our trusted cloud with new security capabilities

Above all, security has been and continues to be the cornerstone of our product strategy. There are three critical areas where Google Cloud’s capabilities can make a meaningful difference for any business’ or government’s digital security transformation:

At Next’ 21, we’re introducing new security products and partnerships that will enable you to:

• Protect your employees with new zero trust access capabilities: We’re delivering new features that expand the surface area for our zero trust access solution, BeyondCorp Enterprise, to cover all your apps – both modern and legacy. The new client connector, now in preview, enables identity and context-aware access to non-web applications running in Google Cloud and non-Google Cloud environments. We are also making it easier for admins to diagnose access failure, triage events, and unblock users with the new Policy Troubleshooter feature. You can learn more about both of these new enhancements in the live BeyondCorp Enterprise demo on October 13.
• Improve your detection and response capabilities: We announced a new collaboration with Cybereason for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) across endpoints, networks, cloud and workspaces. The combination of these capabilities delivers a cloud-native XDR solution, Cybereason XDR powered by Chronicle, that automates prevention for common attacks, guides analysts through security operations and incident response, and enables threat hunting with precision at a pace never before achieved. We are also deepening the integration between Chronicle and Security Command Center (SCC) on GCP. New integrations in preview centralize alerts and investigative workflows across the two platforms, and enable threat-specific pivots by enriching SCC alerts with intelligence on associated threat actors and entities. 
• Automate and bolster protection of your sensitive data: Automatic DLP, now in preview, is a prime example of how we are making Invisible Security a reality. It’s a game-changing capability that discovers and classifies sensitive data for all the BigQuery projects across your entire organization without you needing to do a single thing. We’re also introducing Ubiquitous Data Encryption, a solution which combines our generally available Confidential Computing, External Key Management, and Cloud Storage products to seamlessly encrypt data as it’s sent to the cloud. Using your External Key Management solution, data can now only be decrypted and run in a confidential VM environment, greatly limiting potential exposure.
• Protect your IP and implement a zero trust software supply chain: Today, we’re building on our zero trust software supply chain with new launches. Cloud Build is SLSA Level -1 compliant by default, with scripted builds and available provenance. With the new Build Integrity feature, Cloud Build automatically generates a verifiable build manifest that includes a signed certificate describing the sources that went into the build, the hashes of artifacts used, and other parameters. Additionally, Binary Authorization’s integration with Cloud Build makes it easy to set up deploy-time constraints. You can also now easily pair Binary Authorization with Cloud Run to ensure only trusted images make it to production. These integrations are now generally available.
• Protect your users and brand: We recently announced the preview of Cloud Armor Bot Management, which integrates Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA Enterprise. You can enable protection without any server-side changes to your applications, and because detection and enforcement happens in-line, at the edge of Google’s network, you can mitigate threats before they have a chance to impact your applications, whether they run on GCP, on premise, or in a hybrid or multicloud deployment.
• Ensure secure collaboration: Today, Google Workspace is also introducing new security features. Client-side encryption for Google Meet, in beta, gives customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service used to access keys. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Google Chat, in beta, helps prevent sensitive information from leaking outside of your organization. Check out the blog post from Google Workspace to learn more. 

As we head into three days of great content and engagements from our security and technology teams across Google Cloud at Next ‘21, we want to leave you with this: You are not alone on your security journey. Our goal is to ensure that every day, you are making your organization safer because you have partnered with us. Please make sure to watch our security experts, customers, and partners in our track sessions to go deep on the topics and products that matter most to you.