With GreenBorder, Google moves firmly into the Internet security space
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Blog: Buying the virtual browser company just one of many steps Google is taking toward providing online security.
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One of the Web's biggest names has decided to support the universal log-in protocol for its 248 million users.
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Google Inc. now provides a searchable index to the millions of Google Earth layers on the Web.
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Smaller and newer businesses will now be able to get security certificates that trigger a green address bar in Microsoft browsers under new rules ratified this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Google believes that its consumer-grade Web applications represent the future of enterprise IT. But while Google is quick to trumpet its products' innovative features, the search giant hasn't said much about their security. Until recently, that is. On Monday,Â Google announcedÂ it would spend $625 million to buy messaging security vendor Postini, a move that will give it access to 35,000 business customers, and provide it with the first security products for its Google Apps portfolio. The Postini acquisition represents the most significant investment into security technology yet made by Google. In recent months, Google has started its own security blog along withÂ acquiring another security-related startup, Green Border Technologies. Google Apps customers will be able to use Postini services for tasks like scanning and encrypting e-mail, and archiving messages for compliance and legal purposes, said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager for Google's enterprise business, during a Monday conference call. Around 1,000 small businesses are signing up for Google Apps each day, according to Google. But the company admitted that big businesses have been reluctant to use hosted services because of concerns about security and corporate compliance issues. It hopes that buying Postini will help relieve those concerns. But now that Google has finally decided to become a security vendor, how far will it go? Rival Microsoft has started buying security companies itself, and recently introduced its own line of antivirus software. And Google's recent Green Border purchase has caused some to speculate that the search giant may soon offer a secure Web browser, locked down with Green Border's safe browsing technology. Google has so far refused to say what it plans to do with Green Border's products, but observers see other opportunities ahead. For example, the company could mine its vast database of Web sites to compete with Web filtering companies like Websense or AE6 Technologies. "There's a lot of money to be made by establishing a blacklist of Web sites," said Forrester Research Principal Analyst Chenxi Wang. "I would not be surprised if once they used their massive crawling infrastructure to turn that into a proprietary list and sell that with their enterprise product line." Google recently gave Web developers a way to access this data for free, but the company could build paid services for enterprise users on top of the free product, much in the same way it has developed Google Apps, observers said. "If they add real-time intelligence and put that in an enterprise product, they can definitely make money," Wang said. Wang predicted that Google may also look to acquire information leak prevention companies such as Vontu or Vericept. One of Google's harshest critics on the security front said that things might become even more interesting should Google decide to expand its foothold on the desktop. "If they want to build their own operating system and they want to basically start making Firefox the [default] browser...they're going to need to start bumping up the controls and security and the devices to protect that environment," said Robert Hansen, CEO of Web security consultancy SecTheory. How much the Postini and Green Border acquisitions will go to secure existing Google products is unclear. Google said Monday that it will enhance Gmail with Postini's technology, but Hansen thinks that it will take time before Google builds security into its products from the ground up. In the company's rush to deliver cool and compelling features to its users has come at the expense of security, he believes. And until there is some sort of widespread security problem -- such as the worm and virus outbreaks that shut down Windows users five years ago -- Google has little incentive to make security a priority within its existing products. "It comes down to the business case," Hansen said. "If I want to fix Blogspot I have to convince some product manager somewhere that it's worth doing the investment... and in the end users are going to hate it." James Niccolai in Paris contributed to this report. Â
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Google improves the way it notifies sites that they are afflicted with malware.
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Only Salesforce standing In the morass of Web 2.0 insecurity, Gmail and other Google-hosted services stood out as a beacon of hope. That's because they were believed to be the only free destination that offered protection against a decade-old vulnerability that enabled hackers to steal sensitive authentication details as they pass over Wi-Fi hotspots and other types of public networks.â¦
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Copernic Desktop Search does the work without Google's security flaws.
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There is some confusion about threats posed by the new search tool. Google says common sense is enough of a patch. By Thomas Claburn.
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Multibillion-dollar security initiatives have given rise to a new industry seemingly overnight. A News.com special report.
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(InfoWorld) - Security has been a bit of a black art at Google. Unlike rival Microsoft, which publishes detailed information on its monthly patches and has openly evangelized the steps it takes to secure software, Google has generally been quiet when it comes to talking about security, and it has kept the team that keeps Google's Web sites secure under wraps. Not so anymore. In April, Google researchers presented a paper on Web security at a technical conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discussing the results of the company's ongoing effort to "identify all Web pages on the Internet that could potentially be malicious." A month later, Google started its first-ever security blog, and since then, observers have had their first glimpse into the lives of Google's 100-person security team. That team is managed by Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering and CIO, who spoke with IDG News Service recently. Merrill wouldn't say anything about Google'sÂ recent acquisition of secure browsing software vendor GreenBorder, but he did explain what Google gets from its security investments, and why his company believes that locking down the enterprise PC is not the way to go. Following is an edited transcript of the interview. IDGNS: Google is trying to identify all of the malicious Web pages on the Internet. Can you tell me about that effort? Merrill: We believe that by trying to find badware out there, we can materially help our users. We can do it by flagging it in Toolbar, we can do it by using things like Stopbadware.org to try and help people address them. Information is power in this context, and our goal is to make all the information in the world accessible and useful. That set of work by Niels [Google security specialist Niels Provos] and others is a really great scientific advance toward understanding what the world looks like. And in fact, the coverage of that line of work is part of what led us to step over the curb and start the Google security blog. Because some of the coverage in the [press], Dr. Provos found misleading. He actually got so energized about it that he came to Barry, [Google spokesman Barry Schnitt] and said, "I want to start a malware blog." And Barry said why don't we just do this security blog. We'd been talking about it forever, we just never got around to doing it. So we had a long internal conversation, and our initial worry was we wanted to be transparent and engage our users in a discussion about security, but we didn't want to have one posting and have the thing die. We want to have an ongoing discussion. IDGNS: Does Google ever think of security as something it could turn into a product? Merrill: In some sense, the answer is clearly "yes" because part of Checkout is a security product. But fundamentally, we are a search company. We do search. We want to do things that make users feel safe and secure on the Internet to do searches. I have no idea what we'll do in the future. I don't have a crystal ball. But we're a search company, and what we want to do is help people be able to do searches and learn things and make all the world's information universally accessible and useful. And part of being useful is being secure. IDGNS: Niels Provos was quoted recently as saying that the firewall is dead. What are your thoughts on that? Merrill: Niels's point was that, increasingly, business technology and enterprise technology can't be separated from the Internet and can't be separated from what consumers do. And businesses, increasingly, are using partnerships to get things done. Increasingly, when I go off and I give discussions to other CIOs, what we talk about is the consumerizaiton of enterprise technology. The increasing integration of consumer technology into the enterprise space. So what Niels was talking about was this idea that you can't live your whole life behind one set of walls anymore. Everything that your employees do every day will include stuff they do at home, stuff that other companies have done. We obviously believe in this idea of the Web 2.0, where you're collecting different kinds of applications together to meet consumer needs. The firewall is one line of defense, and it's still useful, just like locks on front doors are still useful. But you need other kinds of defenses as well. You may need application development standards, you may need inter-organizational understanding of things like Stopbadware.org. It's no longer that security is something you can write a check for. Security is a process. There are no lasting technical solutions to social problems. You can't write a check to solve a social problem. So Niels is absolutely right. We think security of the future is a far more complex community based activity. It takes a village. We want to be part of the village. IDGNS: That's interesting because it is in opposition to the trend of locking out social networking sites and locking down the functionality of the PC. It sounds like you guys believe that that's not going to work. Merrill: We believe that in the long run, enterprise technology will be consumerized. We have more than 100,000 domains in Google Apps so far. So 100,000 different domains have decided that the right way for them to run their enterprise applications is to have us do it. And to have us do it with consumer-grade applications because the consumer-grade application involving search, free text unstructured search, involving things like conversation views and connections of threads in e-mails, involving secure document storage and access control, those things are so powerful that enterprises can use them. IDGNS: But do you see yourself in opposition to the trend of locking down the PC? Merrill: I think we see ourselves in opposition to that trend. Obviously, you have to manage things like bandwidth utilization. So in some sense, some of the locking down is done for that reason. Sometimes it's done for regulatory or other reasons. But in general we believe that the world where your business computer is very tightly coupled only to business use and business applications are very complex and really rich and complicated and are very hard to use, we believe that those days are coming to an end.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has jumped into the anti-malware market, snatching up browser-based security software maker GreenBorder Technologies for an undisclosed amount of money. Officials with the search market leader confirmed the deal on May 29, but said that the two firms signed an acquisition agreement roughly two weeks beforehand. Google representatives would not provide further details about the deal itself or a timeframe for the GreenBorder acquisition to be closed within. GreenBorder, which is based in Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., announced news of the buyout on its Web site over the weekend. The company is a venture-backed provider of browser-based host intrusion protection (HIPs) tools for both businesses and consumers. Google officials said that the company moved to make the deal based on its perception that GreenBorder had a crack security software engineering team that could help boost security across all of its products. "This is pretty straightforward, it's primarily a talent acquisition for us, they have a small team of engineers that we were really impressed with," said Aaron Zamost, a corporate communications representative with Google. "The idea is that these guys have great expertise in the security domain which can provide obvious benefits to Google, its users and its advertisers." The company would offer no further details of its plan to integrate GreenBorder's security tools into its own products, which have branched far beyond search into Web-based productivity applications that compete with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office products. The Google Apps Premier Edition, launched in Feb. 2007, offers businesses e-mail, calendar, instant messaging and word processing capabilities. GreenBorder had been offering both a free consumer version of its programs, as well as paid editions of its applications marketed at enterprise users, including a version that specifically promised to secure computers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Outlook products for business users, dubbed GreenBorder Professional Edition. The software also runs in coordination with other browsers and Web-based e-mail systems, including Firefox. GreenBorder has pitched its technology as the security industry's "first desktop DMZ software for Windows" that promises to stop malware code from running on browser-based applications by forcing untrusted content sent through the programs to run in a virtualized protected environment. By running unknown code in such a "time-out" setting, where the content remains isolated from a local host and any trusted network it is connected to, GreenBorder claims to prevent malware programs from delivering their nefarious payloads. Any content arriving on a user's desktop from an untrusted source is visually hosted in a controlled virtual environment highlighted by a green border surrounding programs such as Outlook and IE. As with other companies previously acquired by Google, GreenBorder has halted downloads of its software. However, the firm said on its site that existing users will maintain uninterrupted access to its products with its support team is still available during the transition. The company said it will continue to support existing customers through the end of their current subscriptions to its software. "GreenBorder's proactive, always-on protection against malicious code is fundamentally more effective than reactive, detection-based approaches," Drew Hoffman, president and chief executive officer of GreenBorder told InfoWorld at the time of Professional Edition's 2005 introduction. "With the ever-changing, unpredictable nature of Internet-based threats, organizations are realizing that the race to plug holes in defenses can never be won," Hoffman said. Google has made a series of recent moves to boost its profile in regards to improving security for its customers, launching an official blog on the topic in May and issuing a research paper at the HotBots 2007 conference in Boston in April. According to the HotBots report, roughly one in ten Web sites that Google can find with its powerful Internet crawling technologies carries some form of malware. In late 2006, the company quietly began offering warnings to users about potentially dangerous sites found via its search engine in a manner very similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology. While the company remains coy about its overall security aspirations, industry watchers said they were unsurprised by Google's GreenBorder acquisition as the HIPs technologies gained via the deal could be used to improve security for any number of the firm's products. "With Google moving into online software-as-a-service type applications that are all based on the browser, they're trying to show people that this platform is being secured," said John Pescatore, analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "They can combine these security tools with the online applications, as well as Google toolbar and Google Desktop, and promise a level of automatic protection for end users." The GreenBorder tools do represent a more aggressive form of security than traditional anti-virus technologies, but Pescatore said that users would still need to rely on a combination of both types of software to retain the malware removal capabilities of signature-based applications. The analyst pointed out that Google had previously experimented with applying HIPs technology in its browser-based toolbar via a partnership with WholeSecurity, which was eventually purchased by Syamtec in late 2005. While anti-malware market leaders Symantec and McAfee have both brought similar HIPs products in house via acquisitions over the last several years, Microsoft, which is aggressively expanding its security business, has not offered competing applications as of yet. Pescatore highlighted the fact that the software giant did take ownership of some HIPs capability through its buyout of anti-virus specialists Pelican in 2003, but said the company hasn't moved to launch any technologies as a result of the deal. However, the company may have something currently in development, he said. "Symantec and McAfee both have this type of host intrusion protection, but Microsoft doesn't, and this is the sort of thing that Google can point people to consider if they were worried about using Google Apps through a browser," Pescatore said. "Microsoft acquired HIPs technology from Pelican but never used it, but they've been looking in this area and will have something under development."
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Microsoft has quietly flipped the switch on a feature in IE7 that displays Web sites with new security certification in a green address bar.
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A tool that could help in the battle against spam and phishing attacks receives industry approval.
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Google is proposing that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy.
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Company will use technology from Digital Resolve that builds lists of Web sites and their legitimate IP address.
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The security and stability of the internet has once again come to the forefront of the domain name space, as companies spar to get the best deals out of the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers and the US government.