google cloud: Google Cloud announces security feature to detect crypto mining – Times of India

Google Cloud has announced a new security feature that will help detect cryptocurrency mining in virtual machines (VMs). Crypto mining by exploiting compute resources is a common malicious cyber activity and as per Google, such attacks make up for 86% of cyber threats on the public cloud platform.
The new feature is called Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD) and it’s been rolled out to the customers of Google Cloud’s Security Command Center Premium offering, as a public preview, said Google in a blog post. VMTD has been designed to detect cyber threats like crypto-mining malware on the virtual machines running inside Google Cloud with the help of “agentless memory scanning”.
The company said that VMTD wouldn’t need any additional software agent to detect crypto mining activities in virtual machines. With traditional endpoint security, software agents are deployed inside a guest virtual machine to detect threats. But Google said that with its Compute Engine, it wanted to be able to detect cyber threats like crypto-mining malware without employing any software agent. The company also mentioned the motivation behind agentless memory scanning. Without a software agent, it would result in “less performance impact, lowered operational burden for agent deployment and management, and exposing less attack surface to potential adversaries,” said Google Cloud in its blog post.
Google Cloud added that it “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.”
Google Cloud’s Virtual Machine Threat Detection will be expanded to include other capabilities in the coming months.