The cyber threat environment is growing more dangerous as attacks increase in frequency, scale, and sophistication, and media and entertainment companies make very attractive targets for cybercrime. Their entire business model revolves around the sale of intellectual property, all of which is now stored in digital format, and most of which is now delivered digitally.
No other cloud provider has the breadth and depth of experience in cybersecurity that Google has. Running the world’s most popular search engine gives Google unmatched insight into the real-time threat environment. The company, which has invested millions into research and development to protect its internal systems and customer-facing services, made over 200 security-related product announcements last year. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) allows entertainment and media companies of all sizes to benefit from Google’s deep expertise and continuous research in cybersecurity and take advantage of the same innovations the company uses to protect its own systems in-house, such as the three solutions described below.
Combat threat fatigue and glean actionable insight with Backstory
One of the biggest cybersecurity challenges facing security personnel today is “threat fatigue.” The cyber threat environment is dynamic, with new threats emerging at a pace that is impossible for humans to keep up with, at least without the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.
Chronicle, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently announced its first commercial product, Backstory, a cloud-based SIEM-like system that employs AI and ML to give security personnel instant visibility into the actionable threats buried in petabytes of mostly benign data. Built atop Google’s core infrastructure, Backstory will allow organizations to securely and anonymously upload their entire security telemetry, where it will be indexed, automatically analyzed, and compared against a continuous stream of threat intelligence curated not just from within Google and GCP but public intelligence feeds and other sources. Backstory will bring all of an organization’s security data, from all sources, into one, unified platform and produce immediate actionable intelligence.
As more security telemetry is uploaded, Backstory will learn and become even smarter. To this end, Chronicle is seeking not to compete with cybersecurity firms but partner with them to integrate Backstory into their product offerings and contribute to its body of knowledge.
Web Risk API to protect your employees and your customers from malicious links
Even the most robust enterprise security defenses can be defeated if an employee clicks on a phishing link. Google scans over a billion URLs a day in search of sites set up for purposes of phishing, getting users to download malware, and other deceptive activities. Now available in beta, the Web Risk API runs on the same technology as Google Safe Browsing, which works across the Google ecosystem to protect more than three billion devices every day. With a simple API call, GCP applications can check URLs against Google’s vast list of unsafe URLs, which currently totals over a million and is constantly being updated, then warn users before they click on a link that’s been flagged as unsafe.
Your employees aren’t the only ones at risk. Media and entertainment companies depend on blogs and social media platforms to engage customers and drive interest in new releases, but comment sections and review sites are magnets for spammers and hackers seeking to post malicious links in high-traffic places. That’s why, in addition to filtering inbound traffic and protecting your employees from unsafe links, Web Risk API blocks malicious users from posting unsafe links to your web properties and ensnaring legitimate visitors.
Cloud Armor to prevent DDoS and other targeted attacks
Today’s digital media consumers are very demanding; when they access a site to stream interactive content or read an article, they expect it to load immediately, and they have little patience for buffering or other hiccups. Your company must serve their content quickly and smoothly while at the same time protecting against DDoS attacks from hackers who’d like nothing more than to slow your site to a crawl or knock it offline completely. Cloud Armor, now out of beta, is a DDoS defense and Web Application Firewall (WAF) solution that lets GCP users leverage the same technology and global infrastructure used to keep Google services such as Gmail, Search, and YouTube continuously running.
Cloud Armor offers L3/L4 DDoS defense, IP Allow/Deny capabilities for applications or services behind the Cloud HTTP/S Load Balancer, and a new dashboard that can be accessed through Stackdriver Monitoring. Security personnel can use the dashboard to monitor and analyze traffic to examine the effectiveness of current security policies and access a preview mode to test and evaluate proposed security rules before they go live.
Because Cloud Armor is cloud-based, it can easily scale to match the volume of DDoS attacks, ensuring protection even during times when your systems are under unusually heavy fire.
