Gmail Is Catching More Malicious Attachments With Deep Learning

guest · Feb 25, 2020

Gmail Is Catching More Malicious Attachments With Deep Learning
Google turned to AI—and it’s working
February 25, 2020
https://www.wired.com/story/gmail-catching-more-malicious-attachments-deep-learning/

So on top of its anti-spam and anti-phishing efforts, Gmail expanded its malware detection capabilities at the end of last year to include more tailored document monitoring. Good news, it's working.

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google's security and anti-abuse research lead Elie Bursztein will present findings on how the new deep-learning scanner for documents is faring against the 300 billion attachments it has to process each week.

Currently 56 percent of malware threats against Gmail users come from Microsoft Office documents, and 2 percent come from PDFs. In the months that it's been active, the new scanner has increased its daily malicious Office document detection by 10 percent.
He was also surprised to discover how effective the scanner is at analyzing Microsoft Excel documents, a complicated file format that can be difficult to assess.
Click to expand...

Bursztein points out that kits for crafting malicious documents and tailoring them to evade antivirus scanners are readily available in online criminal forums, ranging in price from about $400 to $5,000.

"We don't have the malware itself in an email; the documents are all we have at that point. But we always want to improve our detection capabilities and with malicious documents we chose the one where we could make the most impact for our users."
Click to expand...

Google: Improving Malicious Document Detection in Gmail with Deep Learning

One of our key protections is our malware scanner that processes more than 300 billion attachments each week to block harmful content. 63% percent of the malicious documents we block differ from day to day. To stay ahead of this constantly evolving threat, we recently added a new generation of document scanners that rely on deep learning to improve our detection capabilities.
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

Gmail Is Catching More Malicious Attachments With Deep Learning

guest Guest

Log in or Sign up

Gmail Is Catching More Malicious Attachments With Deep Learning

guest Guest

Useful Searches