Google now offering $1M crypto mining attack protection

Google Cloud is offer­ing cer­tain cus­tomers up to $1 mil­lion in pro­tec­tion for costs incurred dur­ing unde­tect­ed cryp­to min­ing attacks. 

Sub­scribers to Google’s Secu­ri­ty Com­mand Cen­ter Pre­mi­um, a cyber threat detec­tor, are enti­tled to this hefty protection. 

Philip Bues, a cloud secu­ri­ty expert for mar­ket research firm IDC, said that Google Cloud is tak­ing a step for­ward with this move.

“Cryp­to­min­ing attacks con­tin­ue to be a seri­ous secu­ri­ty and finan­cial issue for orga­ni­za­tions who do not have the right pre­ven­ta­tive con­trols and threat detec­tion capa­bil­i­ties in their cloud envi­ron­ments,” Bues said in a statement.

The deci­sion to include such cov­er­age for these types of breach­es came after Google’s Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Action Team pub­lished a Sep­tem­ber 2022 report show­ing that in 65% of cas­es involv­ing com­pro­mised cloud accounts, hack­ers were engag­ing in cryp­tocur­ren­cy mining.

The attacks are often par­tial­ly or com­plete­ly auto­mat­ed, accord­ing to the report, mak­ing them quick and easy to car­ry out.

In the event that a hack­er man­ages to bypass Google’s detec­tion capa­bil­i­ties and pro­ceeds to run cryp­to min­ing soft­ware on a user’s cloud account, Google will now take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the customer’s expens­es, pro­vid­ing cov­er­age of up to $1 mil­lion for their bill.

It’s impor­tant to note that this pro­tec­tion pro­gram doesn’t have any­thing to do with bit­coin min­ing. It is avail­able only for peo­ple using min­ing soft­ware. One of the most pop­u­lar cryp­to tokens to be mined this way is mon­ero (XMR). 

Block­works reached out to Google and didn’t receive an imme­di­ate response.

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