Category Archives: Alphabet

Apple reports spike in U.S. national security requests amid promises of more transparency

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The number of U.S. national security-related data requests by the government to Apple Inc. more than doubled last year, according to a biannual transparency report released by the consumer tech giant Friday.  Apple received 16,249 national security requests across 8,249 accounts between July 1 – December 31, 2017, almost three times higher than the amount of requests received during the same period in 2016, when the company saw just 5,999 such requests, according to Reuters.  “The national security requests demand that Apple provide information in response to U.S. National Security legal authorities…Though we would like to be more specific, by law this is the most precise information we are currently allowed to disclose,” Apple’s privacy policy reads.  Other major tech firms also saw jumps in national security requests between the end of 2016 and the first half of 2017, Reuters reports. Facebook saw such requests nearly double, and Google reported […]

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Alphabet’s Jigsaw offers political campaigns free DDoS protection

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U.S. political organizations are now being offered a free tool to defend against distributed denial of service  attacks courtesy of Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The offer comes after a local election in Knox County, Tennessee, was recently forced to delay the release of voting results after their website was hit by a DDoS attack. Dubbed “Project Shield,” Jigsaw’s defensive software is designed to flag, filter and contain loads of malicious traffic. The tool is built off of Google’s own server architecture and scanning capabilities, making it capable of quickly identifying and blocking IP addresses that are recognized as being part of botnets. The integrated web software was previously available for free to journalists and human rights organizations, among others, but Wednesday’s inclusion of U.S. political organizations opens the door to a massive new user base that is set to include political […]

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Chronicle: A Meteor Aimed At Planet Threat Intel?

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Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, said today it is in the process of rolling out a new service designed to help companies more quickly make sense of and act on the mountains of threat data produced each day by cybersecurity tools.
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Alphabet launches Chronicle, a new cybersecurity company

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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced a new cybersecurity company named Chronicle on Wednesday. The company comes with massive promises to change the cybersecurity landscape but precious few details on how it will actually be done. Emerging from Alphabet’s X “moonshot” research and development lab, Chronicle bursts onto the scene with a mountain of hype and resources that only a company like Google can provide. The new firm aims to do better at finding important patterns in oceans of data, shrinking the time to discover attacks and ultimately turn the tide against vulnerabilities and hackers. Chronicle comes in two parts, according to a new blog post by Stephen Gillett, Chronicle’s new leader and the former chief operating officer at Symantec. Chronicle is an intelligence and analytics platform coupled with VirusTotal, the popular malware intelligence platform Google bought in 2012. The company’s goal is to beat the cybersecurity industry’s much-talked-about talent shortage by doing things bigger and better than any […]

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Google’s Former CEO Eric Schmidt Steps Down As Alphabet’s Executive Chairman

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After serving for more than 17 years at Google and its parent company Alphabet, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is stepping down as the executive chairman of the company.
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Android Play Protect finishes dead last in first security tests

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Android’s new Play Protect security system finished dead last in the first round of real-world testing in which Google’s cybersecurity software was put up against nearly two dozen well-established competitors by the German antivirus testing lab AV-Test. The testing, conducted in September 2017, showed Play Protect detecting 65.8 percent of new malware samples and 79.2 percent of month-old malware. Both numbers count for last place in their categories when compared with results from rivals like Trend Micro, which finished with a 100 percent mark both times. The industry average was 95.7 percent detection on new malware and 98.4 percent detection on month-old malware. When reached for comment, a Google spokespersom promised to respond to the test results but did not offer a response immediately. The Android security apps that finished best in AV-Test’s rankings were those from Trend Micro, Tencent, Sophos, PSafe DFNDR, Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, G Data, Cheetah Mobile, Bitdefender, Avast, Antiy and AhnLab. Google’s Play […]

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