Google Cloud has proudly announced about a new feature that can detect and report crypto mining in Virtual Machines (VMs). This is possible by the addition of the new feature called Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD) that has the ability to detect 96% of cyber threats hitting the cloud landscape.
According to a research made by Google Cloud Platform in 2019, over 86% of cyber threats existing on public clouds are related to cryptocurrency mining software, where hackers induce malware into the cloud platforms and then start using the cloud’s computing resources to mine digital currency such as Bitcoins and Ether.
In the recent blog post, the web search giant specified that the new VMTD will be offered as Google Cloud’s Security Command Center Premium offering and will run on agent-less memory scanning to detect cyber threats.
No additional software purchases will be required to run the VMTD on virtual machines and that too with no loss in performance and operational burden that is clearly seen in agent deployment and management.
Google Cloud Virtual Machine Threat Detection also keeps a control on the hypervisor software, thus making it difficult for hackers to penetrate the platform with various intrusion tools.
Note- From the past couple of years, especially from the day the Covid-19 pandemic spread like wildfire, allowing companies to adopt cloud environments to support their WFH cultures; hackers have targeted these cloud environments to mine cryptocurrency. So, companies like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and GCP have focused on bolstering their cloud defenses to attract more customers. And the latest step taken by Google to add VMTD is the one among many.
