The expanding crypto sector has focus from hackers who have been ramping up efforts to steal money from unsuspecting victims associated with the sector. In a bid to safeguard crypto miners against security breaches, Google Cloud has develop a new solution call as the Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD).
The tool will detect potential crypto mining malware attacks, also known as cryptojacking.
This service from Google Cloud will also shield poorly configure accounts that are breach and use by hackers to mine cryptocurrencies.
The Security Command Centre Team of Google Cloud aims to protect crypto miners using virtual machines to execute the process.
Virtual machines allow businesses to run an operating system that behaves like a separate computer in an app window on a PC.
Google Cloud Product Manager Timothy Peacock Said in a blog post.:
“What we learned is that we could instrument the hypervisor, the software that runs underneath and orchestrates our customers’ virtual machines to include nearly universal and hard-to-tamper-with threat detection,”.
The VMTD tool will provide agentless memory scanning to detect malwares.
The security tool will also protect users from falling prey to ransomware and data exfiltration attacks.
Timothy Peacock Said :
“Not running an agent inside of their instance means less performance impact, lowered operational burden for agent deployment and management, and exposing less attack surface to potential adversaries,”.
It will act as a third layer of safety along with already enable solutions such as Event Threat Detection and Container Threat Detection for Google Cloud users.
Timothy Peacock Said :
“In addition to threat detection, the premium version of Security Command Center is a comprehensive security and risk management platform for Google Cloud. It provides built-in services that enable you to gain visibility into your cloud assets, discover misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in your resources, and help maintain compliance based on industry standards and benchmarks,”.
The development comes after Google Cloud identified hacking threats looming over crypto mining activities last year.
In November last year, it analysed 50 incidents relating to compromise Google Cloud protocols and realised 86% were relate to crypto mining.
A report by Google Cloud claim that hackers are drawn to hijack a GPU to mine crypto assets, which is a “cloud resource-intensive for-profit activity.”
VMTD will integrate with other parts of Google Cloud, the platform has promise.
