Google Strengthens Their Fight Against Phishing Efforts

Google is now applying machine learning to threat indicators and advancing models to identify phishing attacks. They announced additional security updates to Cloud customers including customers’ control over the new security features in Google Apps like Gmail, Calendar, and Drive. Most are enabled by default such as: 1. Automatically flagging emails from untrusted senders that have encrypted attachments or embedded scripts. 2. Warning against email that tries to copy employee names or that come from a domain that looks similar to your own 3. Enhancing protections against spear phishing attacks by flagging unauthenticated email 4. Scanning images for phishing indicators and expand shortened URLs to uncover bad links.

With these improvements in particular, the company is claiming that more than 99.9 percent of compromised email will either be automatically moved to the spam folder or flagged with warnings.

The features will provide more control as well, since basic device management is automatically enabled for mobile devices that access G Suite. This prevents the need to install profiles on individual phones while administrators get additional security management control including:

1. A view of devices accessing corporate data 2. Pass code enforcement and removal of confidential data.

The security center for G suite which was launched recently also received some additions including a new security chart graphically showing statistics of phishing emails, mobile management charts showing when devices have been compromised, and analysis of overall security health.