At the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Google launched the Google Threat Intelligence service, which combines the expertise of Mandiant with the global reach of the VirusTotal community, the processing power of Gemini 1.5 Pro and an expanded view of cyber threats.
Google Mandiant is a company known for its cyber threat defense, incident response services and threat intelligence. Google completed its acquisition of Mandiant in September 2022.
The VirusTotal community was created to promote collaboration between the antivirus industry, security professionals and malware researchers, along with end users. In September 2012, Google acquired VirusTotal. Currently, VirusTotal is part of Chronicle, a subsidiary of Google.
Gemini 1.5 Pro is a multimodal model developed by Google DeepMind. It has the ability to process and understand various types of data, including text, images, audio, video and code, in a coherent and efficient way.
How Google Threat Intelligence works
The service is powered by billions of signals from devices and emails, providing a deep understanding and detail about current and emerging threats. A key element of this new service is Gemini in Threat Intelligence, an AI agent that enables conversational searches of a vast repository of threat intelligence. It gives users the ability to quickly get information and protect against threats more effectively.
The main features of the Google Threat Intelligence service:
- Google threat insights: Protection for 4 billion devices and 1.5 billion email accounts, blocking 100 million phishing attempts per day.
- Frontline intelligence: The Mandiant team analyzes attacker tactics and techniques in more than 1,100 investigations annually.
- Human and crowdsourced intelligence: Close monitoring of “threat actor” groups and contributions from a global community of over 1 million users.
An example of using Google Threat Intelligence.
An interesting aspect of Google Threat Intelligence is its ability to simplify complex and demanding procedures, such as reverse engineering of malware, by using Gemini 1.5 Pro. It supports up to 1 million tokens and was able to process the entire decompiled code of the WannaCry malware file in a single step, completing the analysis and identifying the killswitch in just 34 seconds.
Dave Gruber, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said, “Google offers two of the industry’s leading pillars of threat intelligence with VirusTotal and Mandiant. Integrating both services into a single offering, enhanced with artificial intelligence and threat intelligence from Google, gives security teams a new means of operationalizing threat intelligence to better protect their organizations.”
I find the use of artificial intelligence fascinating by both sides of a war that I will summarize as “villains vs authorities”. At the same time, I wonder if in this race to save ourselves (man is considered the weak link in most cyber security incidents), we won’t lose more than we gain.
Tags: Google launches Google Threat Intelligence AIpowered cybersecurity solution
