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Supposedly Google is starting a pilot program of disabling Internet connectivity from employee computers:
The company will disable internet access on the select desktops, with the exception of internal web-based tools and Google-owned websites like Google Drive and Gmail. Some workers who need the internet to do their job will get exceptions, the company stated in materials.
Google has not confirmed this story.
No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years:
Research and development: Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.
(I quote the privacy policy as of today. The Mastodon link quotes the privacy policy from ten days ago. So things are changing fast.)
Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos—at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants.
It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is worth saving.
Researchers are worried about Google’s .zip and .mov domains, because they are confusing. Mistaking a URL for a filename could be a security vulnerability.
Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but Ars Technica declared that the problem has become much worse recently.
The surge is coming from numerous malware families, including AuroraStealer, IcedID, Meta Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Vidar, Formbook, and XLoader. In the past, these families typically relied on phishing and malicious spam that attached Microsoft Word documents with booby-trapped macros. Over the past month, Google Ads has become the go-to place for criminals to spread their malicious wares that are disguised as legitimate downloads by impersonating brands such as Adobe Reader, Gimp, Microsoft Teams, OBS, Slack, Tor, and Thunderbird.
[…]
It’s clear that despite all the progress Google has made filtering malicious sites out of returned ads and search results over the past couple decades, criminals have found ways to strike back. These criminals excel at finding the latest techniques to counter the filtering. As soon as Google devises a way to block them, the criminals figure out new ways to circumvent those protections.
Google’s Project Zero is reporting that software vendors are patching their code faster.
tl;dr
- In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix security vulnerabilities reported from Project Zero. This is a significant acceleration from an average of about 80 days 3 years ago.
- In addition to the average now being well below the 90-day deadline, we have also seen a dropoff in vendors missing the deadline (or the additional 14-day grace period). In 2021, only one bug exceeded its fix deadline, though 14% of bugs required the grace period.
- Differences in the amount of time it takes a vendor/product to ship a fix to users reflects their product design, development practices, update cadence, and general processes towards security reports. We hope that this comparison can showcase best practices, and encourage vendors to experiment with new policies.
- This data aggregation and analysis is relatively new for Project Zero, but we hope to do it more in the future. We encourage all vendors to consider publishing aggregate data on their time-to-fix and time-to-patch for externally reported vulnerabilities, as well as more data sharing and transparency in general.
The Open Source Security Foundation announced $10 million in funding from a pool of tech and financial companies, including $5 million from Microsoft and Google, to find vulnerabilities in open source projects:
The “Alpha” side will emphasize vulnerability testing by hand in the most popular open-source projects, developing close working relationships with a handful of the top 200 projects for testing each year. “Omega” will look more at the broader landscape of open source, running automated testing on the top 10,000.
This is an excellent idea. This code ends up in all sorts of critical applications.
Log4j would be a prototypical vulnerability that the Alpha team might look for —an unknown problem in a high-impact project that automated tools would not be able to pick up before a human discovered it. The goal is not to use the personnel engaged with Alpha to replicate dependency analysis, for example.
DuckDuckGo has had a banner year:
And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search engine and other products designed to “empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs,” remains a rounding error compared to Google in search.
I use it. It’s not as a good a search engine as Google. Or, at least, Google often gets me what I want faster than DuckDuckGo does. To solve that, I use use the feature that allows me to use Google’s search engine through DuckDuckGo: prepend “!Google” to searches. Basically, DuckDuckGo launders my search.
EDITED TO ADD (1/12): I was wrong. DuckDuckGo does not provide privacy protections when searching using Google.
Google took steps to shut down the Glupteba botnet, at least for now. (The botnet uses the bitcoin blockchain as a backup command-and-control mechanism, making it hard to get rid of it permanently.) So Google is also suing the botnet’s operators.
It’s an interesting strategy. Let’s see if it’s successful.
Google researchers discovered a MacOS zero-day exploit being used against Hong Kong activists. It was a “watering hole” attack, which means the malware was hidden in a legitimate website. Users visiting that website would get infected.
From an article:
Google’s researchers were able to trigger the exploits and study them by visiting the websites compromised by the hackers. The sites served both iOS and MacOS exploit chains, but the researchers were only able to retrieve the MacOS one. The zero-day exploit was similar to another in-the-wild vulnerability analyzed by another Google researcher in the past, according to the report.
In addition, the zero-day exploit used in this hacking campaign is “identical” to an exploit previously found by cybersecurity research group Pangu Lab, Huntley said. Pangu Lab’s researchers presented the exploit at a security conference in China in April of this year, a few months before hackers used it against Hong Kong users.
The exploit was discovered in August. Apple patched the vulnerability in September. China is, of course, the obvious suspect, given the victims.
EDITED TO ADD (11/15): Another story.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.