Google’s Sec-Gemini v1 Takes on Hackers & Outperforms Rivals by 11%

Google’s Sec-Gemini v1 Takes on Hackers & Outperforms Rivals by 11%

Image: Sundry Photography/Adobe Stock In a bid to tilt the cybersecurity battlefield in favor of defenders, Google has introduced Sec-Gemini v1, a new experimental AI model designed to help security teams identify threats, analyze incidents, and understand vulnerabilities faster and more accurately than before. Announced by the company’s cybersecurity research leads, Elie Burzstein and Marianna Tishchenko, Sec-Gemini v1 is the latest addition to Google’s growing family of Gemini-powered tools — but this time, it is…

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Google DeepMind Proposes AI ‘Monitors’ to Police Hyperintelligent Models

Google DeepMind Proposes AI ‘Monitors’ to Police Hyperintelligent Models

Google DeepMind has introduced a new approach to securing frontier generative AI and released a paper on April 2. DeepMind focused on two of its four key risk areas: “misuse, misalignment, mistakes, and structural risks.” DeepMind is looking beyond current frontier AI to artificial general intelligence (AGI), human-level smarts, which could revolutionize healthcare and other industries or trigger technological chaos. There is some skepticism over whether AGI of that magnitude will ever exist. Asserting that…

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Google's Present to Enterprise Gmail Users: End-to-End Encryption

Google's Present to Enterprise Gmail Users: End-to-End Encryption

Image: Google All enterprise users of Gmail can now easily apply end-to-end encryption to their emails. Prior to today, this was a luxury reserved for big businesses with significant IT resources, but Google recognises that email attacks are on the rise across the board. Starting today, Gmail users can send end-to-end encrypted emails to others within their organisation; in the coming weeks, they will also be able to send encrypted emails to Gmail inboxes outside…

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Android Malware Exploits a Microsoft-Related Security Blind Spot to Avoid Detection

Android Malware Exploits a Microsoft-Related Security Blind Spot to Avoid Detection

This Motorola Moto G Power 5G shows the midnight blue color option. Image: Amazon New Android malware is using Microsoft’s .NET MAUI to fly under the radar in a new cybersecurity dust-up this week. Disguised as actual services such as banking and social media apps targeting Indian and Chinese-speaking users, the malware is designed to gain access to sensitive information. Cybersecurity experts with McAfee’s Mobile Research Team say that, while the threat is currently aimed…

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Google Acquires Startup Wiz for $32B to 'Turbocharge Improved Cloud Security’

Google Acquires Startup Wiz for B to 'Turbocharge Improved Cloud Security’

Image: Wiz Google has announced it is acquiring cybersecurity startup Wiz for $32 billion. The acquisition is parent company Alphabet’s largest to date, more than doubling its previous record-breaking $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility in 2012. The company appears to have pursued this deal aggressively due to the growing demand for secure cloud services. The surge in generative AI has prompted tech companies to rush for cloud infrastructure, while major security incidents, such as…

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iPhone-Android: A Major Privacy Upgrade is Coming Soon

iPhone-Android: A Major Privacy Upgrade is Coming Soon

Image: vinnikava/Envato Elements Cross-platform encrypted messaging between iPhone and Android is coming soon, thanks to updated Rich Communication Services (RCS) standards. The GSM Association has announced that the latest RCS specifications now include end-to-end encryption based on the Messaging Layer Security protocol. This breakthrough, initially teased back in September, will finally allow secure, encrypted messaging between different mobile platforms. This is a huge privacy win — end-to-end encryption (E2EE) means nobody else can see your…

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Google Launches Gemini 2.0 with Autonomous Tool Linking

Google Launches Gemini 2.0 with Autonomous Tool Linking

Google is embracing “agentic experiences” in the rollout of Gemini 2.0, its new flagship family of generative AI expected to compete with ChatGPT with OpenAI o1, GitHub Copilot, and Amazon Nova. The tech giant released the first model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, on Dec. 11 for global developers through the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Consumers can expect Gemini 2.0 to impact Google Search and AI Overviews, with limited testing beginning next…

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Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Patches One Actively Exploited Vulnerability, Among Others

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Patches One Actively Exploited Vulnerability, Among Others

December brought a relatively mild Patch Tuesday, with one vulnerability having been actively exploited. Of all 70 vulnerabilities fixed, 16 were classified as critical. “This year, cybersecurity professionals must be on Santa’s nice list, or, at the very least, Microsoft’s,” Tyler Reguly, associate director of security R&D at cybersecurity software and services company Fortra, told TechRepublic in an email. Microsoft patches leaky CLFS CVE-2024-49138 is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log…

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Apple Patches Two Zero-Day Attack Vectors

Apple Patches Two Zero-Day Attack Vectors

Apple’s latest security updates for iOS, macOS, Safari, visionOS, and iPadOS contained brief but critical disclosures of two actively exploited vulnerabilities. The tech giant said Clément Lecigne and Benoît Sevens of Google’s Threat Analysis Group discovered the vulnerabilities. NIST lists the vulnerabilities as CVE-2024-44308 and CVE-2024-44309. What are the vulnerabilities Apple patched? Apple didn’t disclose much information about the exploitation or what attackers might have done using these vulnerabilities. However, the Threat Analysis Group works…

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Threat Actors Are Exploiting Vulnerabilities Faster Than Ever

Threat Actors Are Exploiting Vulnerabilities Faster Than Ever

New research by cybersecurity firm Mandiant provides eyebrow-raising statistics on the exploitation of vulnerabilities by attackers, based on an analysis of 138 different exploited vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2023. The findings, published on Google Cloud’s blog, reveals that vendors are increasingly being targeted by attackers, who are continually reducing the average time to exploit both zero-day and N-day vulnerabilities. However, not all vulnerabilities are of equal value to attackers, as their significance depends on…

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