Google Workspace | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google's  Gemini  large language model (LLM) is susceptible to security threats that could cause it to divulge system prompts, generate harmful content, and carry out indirect injection attacks. The findings come from HiddenLayer, which said the issues impact consumers using Gemini Advanced with Google Workspace as well as companies using the LLM API. The first vulnerability involves getting around security guardrails to leak the system prompts (or a system message), which are designed to set conversation-wide instructions to the LLM to help it generate more useful responses, by asking the model to output its "foundational instructions" in a markdown block. "A system message can be used to inform the LLM about the context," Microsoft  notes  in its documentation about LLM prompt engineering. "The context may be the type of conversation it is engaging in, or the function it is supposed to perform. It helps the LLM generate more appropriate responses.&qu

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a "severe design flaw" in Google Workspace's domain-wide delegation ( DWD ) feature that could be exploited by threat actors to facilitate privilege escalation and obtain unauthorized access to Workspace APIs without super admin privileges. "Such exploitation could result in theft of emails from Gmail, data exfiltration from Google Drive, or other unauthorized actions within Google Workspace APIs on all of the identities in the target domain," cybersecurity firm Hunters  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The design weakness – which remains active to this date – has been codenamed  DeleFriend  for its ability to manipulate existing delegations in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace without possessing super admin privileges. When reached for comment, Google disputed the characterization of the issue as a design flaw. "This report does not identify an underlying security issue in ou

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

A set of novel attack methods has been demonstrated against Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform that could be potentially leveraged by threat actors to conduct ransomware, data exfiltration, and password recovery attacks. "Starting from a single compromised machine, threat actors could progress in several ways: they could move to other cloned machines with  GCPW  installed, gain access to the cloud platform with custom permissions, or decrypt locally stored passwords to continue their attack beyond the Google ecosystem," Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender,  said  in a new report. A prerequisite for these attacks is that the bad actor has already gained access to a local machine through other means, prompting Google to mark the bug as  not eligible for fixing  "since it's outside of our threat model and the behavior is in line with Chrome's practices of storing local data." However, the Romanian cybersecurity firm has wa

Any app that can improve business operations is quickly added to the SaaS stack. However, employees don't realize that this SaaS-to-SaaS connectivity, which typically takes place outside the view of the security team, significantly increases risk. Whether employees connect through Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, or any other app, security teams have no way to quantify their exposure. These 'secondary' apps can be requesting an intrusive set of permissions or be malicious. Every click authorizing access may grant the right to edit or delete company files, send emails on behalf of the user, create new files, or otherwise handle data in a way that poses a profound threat to the organization's security. To handle the SaaS Security challenges, security teams need to address the entire SaaS ecosystem.  Today's SaaS security evolution has expanded SaaS security beyond simply preventing access. It extends far beyond securing the app. Today's orga

Google on Monday announced that it's rolling out client-side encryption to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), thereby giving its enterprise customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service they choose to access those keys. "With client-side encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google, while users can continue to take advantage of Google's native web-based collaboration, access content on mobile devices, and share encrypted files externally," the search giant  said .  "When combined with our other encryption capabilities, customers can add new levels of data protection for their Google Workspace data." The development coincides with the Google Workspace and Google Chat's  broader availability to all users  with a Google account. Workspace is the company's enterprise offering consisting of Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and other tools. Businesses using Google Workspace have the choice o