Improving Gmail Malicious Document Detection with Deep Learning

Improving Gmail Malicious Document Detection with Deep Learning

Gmail protects your incoming mail against spam, phishing attempts, and malware. Now Gmail Malicious Document Detection works with the Help of Deep Learning. Gmail existing machine learning models are highly effective at doing this, and in conjunction with our other protections, they help block more than 99.9% of threats from reaching Gmail inboxes.

 

Gmail Malicious Document Detection - Old Scanner

One of gmail key protections is gmail malware scanner that processes more than 300 billion attachments each week to block harmful content. 63% percent of the malicious documents we block differ from day to day. To stay ahead of this constantly evolving threat, we recently added a new generation of document scanners that rely on deep learning to improve our detection capabilities.

Gmail Malicious Document Detection Using New Scanner and Working with Deep Learning

TensorFlow

Since the new scanner launched at the end of 2019, google increased gmail daily detection coverage of Office documents that contain malicious scripts by 10%. Gmail technology is especially helpful at detecting adversarial, bursty attacks. In these cases, gmail new scanner has improved gmail detection rate by 150%. Under the hood, gmail new scanner uses a distinct TensorFlow deep-learning model trained with TFX (TensorFlow Extended) and a custom document analyzer for each file type. The document analyzers are responsible for parsing the document, identifying common attack patterns, extracting macros, deobfuscating content, and performing feature extraction.

Strengthening gmail document detection capabilities is one of gmail key focus areas, as malicious documents represent 58% of the malware targeting Gmail users. Gmail are still actively developing this technology, and right now, gmail only use it to scan Office documents.

Gmail new scanner runs in parallel with existing detection capabilities, all of which contribute to the final verdict of gmail decision engine to block a malicious document. Combining different scanners is one of the cornerstones of our defense-in-depth approach to help protect users and ensure our detection system is resilient to adversarial attacks.
Gmail will continue to actively expand the use of artificial intelligence to protect gmail users’ inboxes, and to stay ahead of attacks.

 

Gmail Malicious Attachments Removal

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Google Cloud Platform – Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP)

Google announced a yearly Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VRP Prize to promote security research of GCP. Since then, google received many interesting entries as part of this new initiative from the security research community. Google announcing the winner as well as several updates to google program for 2020.
After careful evaluation of all the submissions, here google announce 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, google tripling the total amount of the GCP VRP Prize this year. Google 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

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 google 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.

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.