Security and the way we’ve been able to advance user protections over the years is hands down one of my favorite topics when it comes to Chrome. I’ve been on the Chrome team for over 14 years and have seen the browser evolve to become a critical tool that helps people get work done at home or in the office. At the same time, Chrome is often the best line of defense to protect users against malicious software on the internet.

Now more than ever, security has to be top of mind for IT and security teams. Cybercrime is up 600% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and remote work has increased the average cost of a data breach by $137,000. Those numbers are staggering. And IT teams need to make sure every piece of their tech stack helps support their security needs.

Chrome has worked for years to quickly mitigate risks, block malicious sites and content, and proactively improve web security to keep your users and corporate data safe, pioneering new layered defenses like sandboxing and site isolation. When we think of security and Chrome, we believe it takes multiple elements of security coming together to give organizations the best protection possible.

Security you don’t have to think about: Chrome has many built in protections in place by default that benefit all users. This includes our team’s work to minimize zero days and roll out fixes quickly. With auto updates enabled, Chrome offers enterprises fast and automatic fixes for zero day vulnerabilities. The Chrome security team recently published a post explaining the state of in-wild-bugs that’s worth a read. More examples of the defense-in-depth Chrome offers include capabilities like site isolation and sandboxing that keep malicious code from affecting other visited sites or impacting user machines. Our scanning infrastructure helps us detect and remove harmful extensions from the Chrome Web Store (in fact, last year we saw an almost 90% drop in malware) to prevent your end users from getting infected with malicious extensions. These are protections built directly into Chrome that automatically keep your users and organization safe.

Protections for Chrome users: We provide additional layers of protection that keep your end users safe while they’re on the web and give them helpful information whenever there are potential security risks. For example, Safe Browsing, offered natively in Chrome, helps protect devices by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download malicious files. We also give users insights into the safety of their passwords, letting them know if their passwords have been compromised, or even prompting them to change their corporate password if they try to re-use it against company policies. You users are working hard to get things done, and Chrome’s layered security supports their workflows while helping them stay safe on the web.

Enterprise Controls: Every organization has unique security needs. That’s why Chrome provides enterprises with advanced safeguards and granular policy management to help meet those security goals. With hundreds of policy options, admins can use a variety of management tools, including Chrome Browser Cloud Management, to customize the browser. Chrome Browser Cloud Management goes even further, providing powerful enterprise extension management, a security priority for many organizations. Our extension request workflow allows end users to request extensions and admins to allow or deny extension requests. We also recently released extension pinning that allows admins to pin to specific versions of extensions to support any internal security review processes.

Visibility and reporting is another focus area to support IT teams. Through Chrome Browser Cloud Management, administrators can get more insight into their browser environment. This data can help IT teams make security decisions, better understand the devices running Chrome and investigate if issues arise.

Zero trust security: Finally, Chrome can help modernize an enterprise’s security strategy by migrating to Zero Trust access models. BeyondCorp Enterprise helps secure endpoints by directly integrating Threat and Data Protection in Chrome. This protects against intentional or accidental data loss and prevents malware and phishing in real-time. Additionally, Chrome and BeyondCorp Enterprise provide device trust and endpoint security signals directly from the browser, significantly easing deployment of zero-trust in your environment. In 2022, we plan to partner with leading players in the cybersecurity and zero trust space to add additional integrations.

For security recommendations, check out the new Chrome 2.1 CIS Benchmark that covers independent recommendations on which Chrome policies to configure to help support organizations’ security and compliance needs.

Every day, we stop more than 100 million harmful emails from reaching Gmail users. Last year, during the peak of the pandemic crisis we saw 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19. This is in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages. Our ML models evolve to understand and filter new threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users.

We wanted to explore what factors influence being targeted by email phishing and malware and whether higher-risk users are adopting the strongest protections we have to offer. To do this, we teamed up with researchers at Stanford University to study over a billion phishing and malware emails and their anonymized targets. We recently presented our study at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), and it’s now available here.

We found that multiple factors correlate with higher risk: where you live, what devices you use, and whether your information appeared in previous third-party data breaches. 

Phishing and malware evolves faster than you think

We aggregated and analyzed all of the phishing and malware campaigns that Gmail automatically blocked over a five-month period to identify patterns. 

• We found that users in the United States were the most popular targets (42% of attacks), followed by the United Kingdom (10% of attacks), and Japan (5% of attacks). 
• Most attackers don’t localize their efforts, using the same English email template for users in multiple countries. 
• There is, however, some evidence of regional attackers: 78% of the attacks targeting users in Japan occurred in Japanese, while 66% of attacks targeting Brazilian users occurred in Portuguese.

We also noticed some patterns among attackers and botnets that distribute phishing and malware emails:

• They rely on fast-churning campaigns. A similar email based on a template is sent to 100–1,000 targets on average. 
• The campaigns are brief and bursty, lasting just one to three days on average.
• In a single week, these small-scale campaigns accounted for over 100 million phishing and malware emails in aggregate, targeting Gmail users around the globe.

While the users that attackers target change from week to week, in aggregate these patterns remain largely stable over time.

Factors that correlate with heightened risk

Beyond how attackers operate phishing and malware campaigns, we also analyzed what factors put a user at higher risk of attack. In order to avoid singling out any individual user or their personal data, we used an anonymization technique called “k-anonymity” to ensure any risk trends that we identified applied to a broad group of similar users. We modeled the likelihood of receiving any phishing or malware emails in a given week as a function of geographic location, demographics, security posture, device access, and prior security incidents (such as having personal data revealed by a third-party data breach).

Here is what our model found:

• Having your email or other personal details exposed in a third-party data breach increased the odds of being targeted by phishing or malware by 5X. 
• Where you live also affects risk. In Australia, users faced 2X the odds of attack compared to the United States, despite the United States being the most popular target by volume (not per capita). 
• With respect to demographics, the odds of experiencing an attack was 1.64X higher for 55- to 64-year-olds, compared to 18- to 24-year-olds.
• Mobile-only users experienced lower odds of attack: 0.80X compared to multi-device users. This may stem from socioeconomic factors related to device ownership and attackers targeting wealthier groups.

These correlations help us understand that risk is not evenly spread across geographic and demographic boundaries. 

How to stay safer

Gmail’s phishing and malware protections are automatically turned on by default. Here’s our top recommendations for what you can do today to stay safer.

For individual users:

• Complete a Security Checkup for personalized and actionable security advice.
• If appropriate, consider enrolling in Google’s Advanced Protection program, which provides Google’s strongest security to users at increased risk of targeted online attacks. 
• Enable Enhanced Safe Browsing Protection in Google Chrome to substantially increase your defenses against dangerous websites and downloads on the web.
• Browse these additional tips to manage your online security and choose the right level of protection for yourself.

For Workspace admins:

• New research reveals who’s targeted by email attacks. Take a look at our advanced phishing and malware protection. These are turned on by default across all Google Workspace licenses, and you can further customize them according to the unique needs of your organization.

Expectations for both consumer and commercial products have changed. Consumers want products that evolve with their needs, adapt to their preferences, and stay up-to-date over time. Manufacturers, in turn, need to create products that provide engaging customer experiences not only to better compete in the marketplace, but also to provide new monetization opportunities. 

However, embedding intelligence into new and existing products is challenging. Updating hardware is costly, and existing connected products do not have the capability to add new features. Furthermore, manufacturers do not have sufficient customer insights due to product telemetry and customer data silos, and may lack the AI expertise to quickly develop and deploy these features. 

That’s why today we’re launching Intelligent Products Essentials, a solution that allows manufacturers to rapidly deliver products that adapt to their owners, update features over-the-air using AI at the edge, and provide customer insights using analytics in the cloud. The solution is designed to assist manufacturers in their product development journeys—whether developing a new product or enhancing existing ones. 

With Intelligent Products Essentials, manufacturers can:

• Personalize customer experiences: Provide a compelling ownership experience that evolves over the lifetime of the product. For example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profile.
• Manage and update products over-the-air: Deploy updates to products in the field,  gather performance insights and evolve capabilities over time with monetization opportunities.
• Predict parts and service issues: Detect operating thresholds, anomalies and predict failures to proactively recommend service using AI, reducing warranty claims, decreasing parts shortages and increasing customer satisfaction.

In order to help manufacturers quickly deploy these use cases and many more, Intelligent Products Essentials provides the following:

• Edge connections: Connect and ingest raw or time-series product telemetry from various device platforms utilizing IoT Core or Pub/Sub and enable deployment and management of firmware over-the-air and machine learning models with Vertex AI at the edge.
• Ownership App Template: Easily build connected product companion apps that work on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Use a pre-built API and accompanying sample app that can incorporate product or device registration, identity management, and provide application behavior analytics using Firebase.
• Product fleet management: Manage, update and analyze fleets of connected products via APIs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Looker.
• AI services: Create new features or capabilities for your products using AI and machine learning products such as DialogFlow, Vision AI, AutoML, all from Vertex AI.

Enterprise data integration: Integrate data sources such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and others using Dataflow and BigQuery.

Intelligent Products Essentials helps manufacturers build new features across consumer, industrial, enterprise, and transportation products. Manufacturers can implement the solution in-house, or work with one of our certified solution integration partners like Quantifi and Softserve. 

“The focus on intelligent products that Google Cloud is deploying provides a digital option for manufacturers and users. At its heart, systems like Intelligent Product Essentials are all about decision making. IDC sees faster and more effective decision-making as the fundamental reason for the drive to digitize products and processes. It’s how you can make faster and more effective decisions to meet heightened customer expectations, generate faster cash flow, and better revenue realization,” said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President at IDC. “Digital offerings like Google’s Intelligent Product Essentials potentially go the last mile with the ability to connect the digital thread all the way through to the final user.”

Customers adopting Intelligent Products Essentials

GE Appliances, a Haier company, are enhancing their appliances using new AI-powered intelligent features to enable:

• Intelligent cooking: Help cook the perfect meal to personal preferences, regardless of your expertise and abilities in the kitchen.
• Frictionless service: Build smart appliances that know when they need maintenance and make it simple to take action or schedule services.
• Integrated digital lifestyle: Make appliances useful at every step of the way by integrating them with digital lifestyle services – for example, automating appliance behaviors according to customer calendars, such as oven preheating or scheduling the dishwasher to run in the late evening.

“Intelligent Products Essentials enhances our smart appliances ecosystem, offering richer consumer habit insights. This enables us to develop and offer new features and experiences to integrate with their digital lifestyle.“ —Shawn Stover, Vice-president Smart Home Solutions at GE Appliances.https://www.youtube.com/embed/zaWAJN8aKOw?enablejsapi=1&

Serial 1, Powered by Harley-Davidson, is using Intelligent Product Essentials to manage and update its next generation eBicycles, and personalize its customers’ digital ownership experiences. 

“At Serial 1, we are dedicated to creating the easiest and most intuitive way to experience the fun, freedom, and adventure of riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle. Connectivity is a key component of delivering that mission, and working together to integrate Intelligent Product Essentials into our eBicycles will ensure that our customers enjoy the best possible user experience.”— Jason Huntsman, President, Serial 1. 

Magic Leap, an augmented reality pioneer with industry-leading hardware and software, is building field service solutions with Intelligent Products Essentials with the goal of connecting manufacturers, dealers, and customers to more proactive and intelligent service.

“We look forward to using Intelligent Products Essentials to enable us to rapidly integrate manufacturers’ product data with dealer service partners into our field service solution. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud as we continue to push the boundaries of physical interaction with the digital world.” — Walter Delph, Chief Business Officer, Magic Leap

Intelligent Product Essentials is available today. To learn more, visit our website.

We launched the Chrome Insider blog in 2019 to share tips and best practices with IT admins so they could better deploy, manage, and secure Chrome browser. Since then, the series has covered everything from supporting legacy browsers to protecting enterprise credentials to simplifying deployments. To make it even easier to find and browse the series, we’ve pulled together all the posts to date here so you can read them all in one place or bookmark them for later.

Managing Chrome tips and tricks

• Understanding Policy Precedence for Chrome browser
• Protecting enterprise credentials with Password Alert
• Managing Chrome browser in a controlled environment
• Simplifying Chrome deployments on macOS
• Configuring Chrome browser in your VDI environment
• Know your options for Modern Enterprise Browser Management
• Managing policies and extensions across operating systems in Chrome Browser

Improving extension management and reporting 

• Improving Chrome browser extension management through permissions
• Publishing custom extensions for the enterprise
• Enhanced extension reporting with Chrome Browser’s Takeout API

Ensuring your organization is secure 

• Managing BeyondCorp Enterprise’s threat and data protection capabilities in Chrome
• A primer on enterprise private browsing modes

Increasing your organization’s productivity

• Ready, set, Chrome—Improvements and polices to make Chrome more performant
• Troubleshooting with Chrome Browser
• Preparing your enterprise for Flash deprecation
• Apps from the past? Fear not with legacy browser support in Chrome Enterprise

Although the series is 16 posts strong, there are plenty more Chrome Insider posts to come. You can read these posts and more on our Chrome Enterprise channel.

We’re excited to announce that Google Cloud Support is now available as Public Preview* in the Google Cloud mobile app.

View and manage Google Cloud Support cases 

We understand how important it is to be able to access and collaborate on Cloud Support cases. As such, we’ve made it easy for you to manage your cases via the mobile app. There is no need to log in to the mobile browser, search for a proper website, and navigate to the place where you need to be. Your Cloud Support cases are now available at your fingertips.

In the Google Cloud mobile app, simply navigate to “Cloud Support (preview)” from any screen by touching your profile picture. 

With just one touch you can see the list of all your support cases and easily dive into their important details.

Create Google Cloud Support cases and take action

Not only can you easily view and manage your existing Cloud Support cases, you can also create new ones on the fly with the Google Cloud mobile app.

Seamlessly browse case comments to see the full history of the support case, and respond to the case with new comments.

Download the Google Cloud app today

The Google Cloud app is a powerful tool for managing your Google Cloud environment on the go, and it just got better. To summarize, we’ve added Cloud Support cases to our mobile app, which lets you:

• Read existing conversations with the Google Cloud Support Team
• Respond to Google Cloud Support cases
• Create new Google Cloud Support cases

These new features are available for you to use today in Public Preview. Download the Google Cloud mobile app from Google Play or the Apple App Store to try it out. Check out the Google Cloud app documentation to learn more about what you can do on-the-go.  If you have any feedback, we would love to hear from you — simply click on the “send feedback” button in the app to share your experience.

*Preview – This product or feature is covered by the Pre-GA Offerings Terms of the Google Cloud Terms of Service. Pre-GA products and features might have limited support, and changes to pre-GA products and features might not be compatible with other pre-GA versions. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.