According to Google's research team, the company has sent over 12,000 security to users from 149 countries. The alerts concern attacks -based email carried out by hacking groups supported by governments foreign
What's most concerning about the whole situation is that this huge number of alerts related to attacks that took place in just three months, from July to September 2019. This was reported in a blog post by Shane Huntley, a member of Google's threat analysis team.
According to Huntley, the attack notifications this quarter are +/- 10% compared to the notifications sent during the same period in 2018 and 2017. This means that in recent years there has been no significant increase or decrease in attacks by government hacking groups.
Google claims that most of these notifications were sent to users in the US and Pakistan, as they were a key target of the attacks.
Essentially, the alerts Google sends are just emails . Google notifies Gmail users when it detects that they have received malicious emails linked to a state-sponsored hacking campaign.
Malicious emails usually contain links that, if opened, install malware on the victims' device or lead to phishing sites, through which hackers can collect the victims' credentials and gain access to their accounts.
Google started sending security alerts seven years ago
Google was the first major company to start sending emails to its users to warn them of threats. It started sending the alerts in 2012. Now, other email service providers, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, are showing similar alerts.
Google made some changes in 2017 to make notifications even more prominent when the user enters their Gmail.
In 2018, the company launched this feature on G Suite accounts as well , so that even more users could be notified.
Google doesn't send notifications to users immediately when they're targeted by hackers. It notifies them with a short delay, and when it does, it sends the emails to hundreds of (affected) accounts at once.
Google stated that with this technique, it confuses hackers and prevents them from understanding which of their tactics work best, because they do not understand which of malicious emails trigger the display of notifications (since these are not sent immediately after receiving the malicious email).
The company said that if users receive any of these notifications they should enroll in Google's Advanced Protection Program (APP).
“We encourage high-risk users, such as journalists, human rights activists, and people who manage political campaigns, to enroll in the Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides the strongest protection against phishing attacks and account breaches,” Huntley said.
“The APP is designed specifically for high-risk accounts and now has more than 15,500 users.”.
