The pitfalls of being an influencer: What parents should know and do

Does your child dream of becoming a YouTube or Instagram celebrity? The influencer lifestyle is not as picture-perfect as it may seem.

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European power grid organization hit by cyberattack

The incident affected our office network, says ENTSO-E, as it implements measures to avoid future cyber-incursions

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Tracking Turla: New backdoor delivered via Armenian watering holes

Can an old APT learn new tricks? Turla’s TTPs are largely unchanged, but the group recently added a Python backdoor.

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Announcing our first GCP VRP Prize winner and updates to 2020 program

Posted by Harshvardan Sharma, Information Security Engineer, Google

Last year, we announced a yearly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VRP Prize to promote security research of GCP. Since then, we’ve received many interesting entries as part of this new initiative from the security research community. Today, we are announcing the winner as well as several updates to our program for 2020.

After careful evaluation of all the submissions, we are excited to announce our winner of the 2019 GCP VRP prize: Wouter ter Maat, who submitted a write-up about Google Cloud Shell vulnerabilities. You can read his winning write-up here.

There were several other excellent reports submitted to our GCP VRP in 2019. To learn more about them watch this video by LiveOverflow, which explains some of the top submissions in detail.

To encourage more security researchers to look for vulnerabilities in GCP and to better reward our top bug hunters, we’re tripling the total amount of the GCP VRP Prize this year. We will pay out a total of $313,337 for the top vulnerability reports in GCP products submitted in 2020. The following prize amounts will be distributed between the top 6 submissions:

  • 1st prize: $133,337
  • 2nd prize: $73,331
  • 3rd prize: $73,331
  • 4th prize: $31,337
  • 5th prize: $1,001
  • 6th prize: $1,000
Like last year, submissions should have public write-ups in order to be eligible for the prize. The number of vulnerability reports in a single write-up is not a factor. You can even make multiple submissions, one for each write-up. These prizes are only for vulnerabilities found in GCP products. If you have budget constraints regarding access to testing environments, you can use the free tier of GCP. Note that this prize is not a replacement of our Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP), and that we will continue to pay security researchers under the VRP for disclosing security issues that affect Google services, including GCP. Complete details, terms and conditions about the prize can be found here.
Thank you to everyone who submitted entries in 2019! Make sure to nominate your VRP reports and write-ups for the 2020 GCP VRP prize here before December 31, 2020 at 11:59 GMT.

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How Google Play Protect kept users safe in 2019

Posted by Rahul Mishra, Program Manager, Android Security and Privacy Team


Through 2019, Google Play Protect continued to improve the security for 2.5 billion Android devices. Built into Android, Play Protect scans over 100 billion apps every day for malware and other harmful apps. This past year, Play Protect prevented over 1.9 billion malware installs from unknown sources. Throughout 2019 there were many improvements made to Play Protect to bring the best of Google to Android devices to keep users safe. Some of the new features launched in 2019 include:
Advanced similarity detection
Play Protect now warns you about variations of known malware right on the device. On-device protections warn users about Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) at install time for a faster response. Since October 2019, Play Protect issued 380,000 warnings for install attempts using this system.
Warnings for apps targeting lower Android versions
Malware developers intentionally target devices running long outdated versions of Android to abuse exploits that have recently been patched. In 2018, Google Play started requiring new apps and app updates be built for new versions of the Android OS. This strategy ensures that users downloading apps from Google Play recieve apps that take advantage of the latest privacy and security improvements in the OS.
In 2019, we improved on this strategy with warnings to the user. Play Protect now notifies users when they install an app that is designed for outdated versions. The user can then make an informed decision to proceed with the installation or stop the app from being installed so they can look for an alternative that target the most current version of Android.

Uploading rare apps for scanning
The Android app ecosystem is growing at an exponential rate. Millions of new app versions are created and shared outside of Google Play daily posing a unique scaling challenge. Knowledge of new and rare apps is essential to provide the best protection possible.
We added a new feature that lets users help the fight against malware by sending apps Play Protect hasn’t seen before for scanning during installation. The upload to Google’s scanning services preserves the privacy of the user and enables Play Protect to improve the protection for all users.

Integration with Google’s Files app
Google’s Files app is used by hundreds of millions of people every month to manage the storage on their device, share files safely, and clean up clutter and duplicate files. This year, we integrated Google Play Protect notifications within the app so that users are prompted to scan and remove any harmful applications that may be installed.

Play Protect visual updates
The Google Play Store has over 2 billion monthly active users coming to safely find the right app, game, and other digital content. This year the team was excited to roll out a complete visual redesign. With this change, Play Protect made several user-facing updates to deliver a cleaner, more prominent experience including a reminder to enable app-scanning in My apps & games to improve security.

The mobile threat landscape is always changing and so Google Play Protect must keep adapting and improving to protect our users. Visit developers.google.com/android/play-protect to stay informed on all the new exciting features and improvements being added to Google Play Protect.
Acknowledgements: Aaron Josephs, Ben Gruver, James Kelly, Rodrigo Farell, Wei Jin and William Luh

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Flaw in popular VPN service may have exposed customer data

NordVPN praised its bug bounty program and said that a fix had been shipped within two days

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How Google does certificate lifecycle management

Posted by Siddharth Bhai and Ryan Hurst, Product Managers, Google Cloud 

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) on the web increase to more than 96% of all traffic seen by a Chrome browser on Chrome OS. That’s an increase of over 35% in just four years, as reported in our Google Transparency Report. Whether you’re a web developer, a business, or a netizen, this is a collective achievement that’s making the Internet a safer place for everyone.

Percentage of pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome by platform (Google Transparency Report)

The way TLS is deployed has also changed. The maximum certificate validity for public certificates has gone from 5 years to 2 years (CA/Browser Forum), and that will drop to 1 year in the near future. To reduce the number of outages caused by manual certificate enrollments, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has standardized Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME). ACME enables Certificate Authorities (CAs) to offer TLS certificates for the public web in an automated and interoperable way. 

As we round off this exciting tour of recent TLS history, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Let’s Encrypt – the first publicly trusted non-profit CA. Their focus on automation and TLS by default has been foundational to this massive increase in TLS usage. In fact, Let’s Encrypt just issued their billionth (!) certificate. Google has been an active supporter of Let’s Encrypt because we believe the work they do to make TLS accessible is important for the security and resilience of the Internet’s infrastructure. Keep rocking, Let’s Encrypt!

Simplifying certificate lifecycle management for Google’s users


These are important strides we are making collectively in the security community. At the same time, these efforts mean we are moving to shorter-lived keys to improve security, which in-turn requires more frequent certificate renewals. Further, infrastructure deployments are getting more heterogeneous. Web traffic is served from multiple datacenters, often from different providers. This makes it hard to manually keep tabs on which certificates need renewing and ensuring new certificates are deployed correctly. So what is the way forward? 

With the adoption numbers cited above, it’s clear that TLS, Web PKI, and certificate lifecycle management are foundational to every product we and our customers build and deploy. This is why we have been expanding significant effort to enable TLS by default for our products and services, while also automating certificate renewals to make certificate lifecycle management more reliable, globally scalable, and trustworthy for our customers. Our goal is simple: We want to ensure TLS just works out of the box regardless of which Google service you use.
In support of that goal, we have enabled automatic management of TLS certificates for Google services using an internal-only ACME service, Google Trust Services. This applies to our own products and services, as well as for our customers across Alphabet and Google Cloud. As a result, our users no longer need to worry about things like certificate expiration, because we automatically refresh the certificates for our customers. Some implementation highlights include:

  • All Blogger blogs, Google Sites, and Google My Business sites now get HTTPS by default for their custom domains.
  • Google Cloud customers get the benefits of Managed TLS on their domains. So:
    • Developers building with Firebase, Cloud Run, and AppEngine automatically get HTTPS for their applications.
    • When deploying applications with Google Kubernetes Engine or behind Google Cloud Load Balancing (GCLB), certificate management is taken care of if customers choose to use Google-managed certificates. This also makes TLS use with these products easy and reliable.

Performance, scalability, and reliability are foundational requirements for Google services. We have established our own publicly trusted CA, Google Trust Services to ensure we can meet those criteria for our products and services. At the same time, we believe in user choice. So even as we make it easier for you to use Google Trust Services, we have also made it possible across Google’s products and services to use Let’s Encrypt. This choice can be made easily through the creation of a CAA record indicating your preference.

While everyone appreciates TLS working out of the box, we also know power users have specialized needs. This is why we have provided rich capabilities in Google Cloud Load Balancing to let customers control policies around TLS termination. 

In addition, through our work on Certificate Transparency in collaboration with other organizations, we have made it easier for our customers to protect their and their customers’ brands by monitoring the WebPKI ecosystem for certificates issued for their domains or those that look similar to their domains, so they can take proactive measures to stop any abuse before it becomes an issue. For example, Facebook used Certificate Transparency Logs to catch a number of phishing websites that tried to impersonate their services. 

We recognize how important security, privacy, and reliability are to you and have been investing across our product portfolio to ensure that when it comes to TLS, you have the tools you need to deploy with confidence. Going forward, we look forward to a continued partnership to make the Internet a safer place together.

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Microsoft: 99.9 percent of hacked accounts lacked MFA

Only 11 percent of all enterprise accounts have multi-factor authentication enabled

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Week in security with Tony Anscombe

ESET research into the Guildma banking trojan – What can you do to stay safe from online fraud – Why become a cybersecurity professional

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Virgin Media data leak exposes details of almost 1 million people

The misconfigured database was accessed by an unauthorized party on at least one occasion

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