Hacking Google: Protecting users
Google released a series of Youtube videos earlier today to give the public a view of the threats and challenges it faces on daily basis and how it investigates, prevents and protects its infrastructure to keep its employees, users and their data protected day after day. It shines light on its team of security experts which works round the clock to stay one step ahead of the attacks so that its users don’t have to do so.
The series starts with the background of how Google was attacked by China in its episode about Project Aurora. The video goes to great lengths to explain how the incident was initially identified, how they gathered a team of experts and spent a month to secretly go investigate every single evidence they had. They eventually put all the pieces together and declared they were attacked by a state sponsor. Further investigation also found out that they were just one of the many companies which were attacked.
There are a total of six episodes in total and all of them are attached below for easy access.
The second episode goes deeper into the “TAG” team (Thread analysis group) which tracks and identifies all external threats and documents how to avoid/protect against them.
Third episode gives an insight into how teams detect and respond to security threats.
The fourth episode talks about the “Red team” which is constantly trying to break things from within. They are the whitehat hackers trying to find vulnerabilities before the blackhats find it.
Google is one of the few companies which takes so much pride in its work around security, that it pays handsomely for bugs found by the public. There is a leaderboard for this as well.