The proliferation of connected devices, coupled with the rise of the cybercriminal, has made protecting your business and your customers in the digital world increasingly difficult. One of the most powerful tools to fight cybercrime is knowledge, and keeping yourself informed can help prevent the theft of data or an internet security breach — and now Google is seeking to make that knowledge more readily available.
Google’s Safe Browsing tool, which is built into browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Safari, claims that it protects up to 1 billion people by blocking and blacklisting sites it believes are hosting malware or deceptive content. While this is clearly a positive, it’s also a big problem for the owners of legitimate websites that have been hacked by criminals to host the malicious content.
To address this issue, Google is now expanding its Safe Browsing service to give the people in charge of those sites greater insight into just what has gone wrong and why a website has been blacklisted. “The updated information provides more specific explanations of six different security issues detected by Safe Browsing,” Kelly Hope Harrington of Google’s Safe Browsing team wrote in a blog post. “These explanations give webmasters more context and detail about what Safe Browsing found.”
In addition to simply providing more information about the cause of the blacklisting, Google will help webmasters get their sites back up and running by providing tailored recommendations for each issue, including sample URLs which can be checked to identify the source of the issue.
Organizations that rely on customers having access to their websites — such as those in retail, government and hospitality — will welcome the new Google initiative, which can help them avoid losing significant amounts of money in missed revenue.
Implications for BYOD
An internet security breach is just one of a large range of threats that enterprises face in the modern world. As smartphones become increasingly powerful and are now used by employees to check work email and communicate with colleagues both in and out of the office, one of the biggest challenges facing companies is how to implement a secure bring your own device (BYOD) policy for mobile devices.
As with combating an internet security breach, tackling the vulnerabilities associated with BYOD requires increasing people’s knowledge and understanding of the problem. By educating your employees and giving them the knowledge required to adequately address these issues, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of a cyberattack impacting their business. In addition to increased education, ensuring employee mobile devices are protected by secure platforms like Samsung’s Knox can help keep valuable data safe and out of the hands of criminals.
