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Google Cloud Adds Crypto Mining Malware Threat Detection Service

The company's new Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD) will be able to identify threats from coin mining, data exfiltration and ransomware.

Updated May 11, 2023, 5:56 p.m. Published Feb 7, 2022, 8:32 p.m.

Signage for Google Cloud is displayed at the Google Inc. booth during the SoftBank World 2019 event in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, July 18, 2019. The founders of Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab, indoor farming startup Plenty, Indian hotel chain OYO Rooms and payments service Paytm took the stage at an annual SoftBank conference to explain how artificial intelligence helps them stay on top in their respective fields. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Google Cloud said it's adding Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), which will help detect threats including malware that mines crypto currency on a compromised account.

“VMTD is a first-to-market detection capability from a major cloud provider that provides agentless memory scanning to help detect threats like crypto-mining malware inside your virtual machines running in Google Cloud,” according to a blog post from Google.
The move comes after the company said in November that compromised Google Cloud accounts were used by 86% of “malicious actors” to mine cryptocurrencies.
VMTD will also be able to protect Google Cloud Platform customers against attacks such as data exfiltration and ransomware, the blog said.
The measure is being rolled out as “public preview,” and Google will integrate VMTD with other parts of its service over the next few months.

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Aoyon Ashraf

Aoyon Ashraf is CoinDesk's managing editor for Breaking News. He spent almost a decade at Bloomberg covering equities, commodities and tech. Prior to that, he spent several years on the sellside, financing small-cap companies. Aoyon graduated from University of Toronto with a degree in mining engineering. He holds ETH and BTC, as well as ALGO, ADA, SOL, OP and some other altcoins which are below CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.