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Posted by Ian Eldred Pudney, Google Information Security On Friday, we announced that we’ve released the Atheris Python fuzzing engine as open source. In this post, we’ll briefly talk about its origins, and then go into lots more detail on how it works. The Origin Story  Every year since 2013, Google has held a “Fuzzit”, an internal event where Googlers write fuzzers for their code or open source software. By October 2019, however, we’d already written fuzzers for most of the open-source C/C++ code we use. So for that Fuzzit, the author of this post wrote a Python fuzzing engine based on libFuzzer. Since then, over 50 Python fuzzers have been written at Google, and countless bugs have been reported and fixed. Originally, this fuzzing engine could only fuzz native extensions,…

Posted by Ali Sarraf, Product Manager, ChromePasswords help protect our online information, which is why it’s never been more important to keep them safe. But when we’re juggling dozens (if not hundreds!) of passwords across various websites—from shopping, to entertainment to personal finance—it feels like there’s always a new account to set up or manage. While it’s definitely a best practice to have a strong, unique password for each account, it can be really difficult to remember them all—that’s why we have a password manager in Chrome to back you up. As you browse the web, on your phone, computer or tablet, Chrome can create, store and fill in your passwords with a single click. We'll warn you if your passwords have been compromised after logging in to sites, and…

Posted by Kevin Deus, Joel Galenson, Billy Lau and Ivan Lozano, Android Security & Privacy Team The Android platform team is committed to securing Android for every user across every device. In addition to monthly security updates to patch vulnerabilities reported to us through our Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP), we also proactively architect Android to protect against undiscovered vulnerabilities through hardening measures such as applying compiler-based mitigations and improving sandboxing. This post focuses on the decision-making process that goes into these proactive measures: in particular, how we choose which hardening techniques to deploy and where they are deployed. As device capabilities vary widely within the Android ecosystem, these decisions must be made carefully, guided by data available to us to maximize the value to the ecosystem as a whole. The…

Posted by Eric Brewer, Rob Pike, Abhishek Arya, Anne Bertucio and Kim Lewandowski Executive Summary: The security of open source software has rightfully garnered the industry’s attention, but solutions require consensus about the challenges and cooperation in the execution. The problem is complex and there are many facets to cover: supply chain, dependency management, identity, and build pipelines. Solutions come faster when the problem is well-framed; we propose a framework (“Know, Prevent, Fix”) for how the industry can think about vulnerabilities in open source and concrete areas to address first, including: Consensus on metadata and identity standards: We need consensus on fundamentals to tackle these complex problems as an industry. Agreements on metadata details and identities will enable automation, reduce the effort required to update software, and minimize the impact of…

Posted by Anna Hupa, Senior Strategist, Vulnerability Rewards TeamDespite the challenges of this unprecedented year, our vulnerability researchers have achieved more than ever before, partnering with our Vulnerability Reward Programs (VRPs) to protect Google’s users by discovering security and abuse bugs and reporting them to us for remediation. Their diligence helps us keep our users, and the internet at large, safe, and enables us to fix security issues before they can be exploited. The incredibly hard work, dedication, and expertise of our researchers in 2020 resulted in a record-breaking payout of over $6.7 million in rewards, with an additional $280,000 given to charity. We’d like to extend a big thank you to our community of researchers for collaborating with us. It’s your excellent work that brings our programs to life,…

Posted by Oliver Chang and Kim Lewandowski, Google Security Team We are excited to launch OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities), our first step towards improving vulnerability triage for developers and consumers of open source software. The goal of OSV is to provide precise data on where a vulnerability was introduced and where it got fixed, thereby helping consumers of open source software accurately identify if they are impacted and then make security fixes as quickly as possible. We have started OSV with a data set of fuzzing vulnerabilities found by the OSS-Fuzz service. OSV project evolved from our recent efforts to improve vulnerability management in open source ("Know, Prevent, Fix" framework). Vulnerability management can be painful for both consumers and maintainers of open source software, with tedious manual work involved in…

Posted by Dan Lorenc, Infrastructure Security Team Memory-safety vulnerabilities have dominated the security field for years and often lead to issues that can be exploited to take over entire systems.  A recent study found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. Software written in unsafe languages often contains hard-to-catch bugs that can result in severe security vulnerabilities, and we take these issues seriously at Google. That’s why we’re expanding our collaboration with the Internet Security Research Group to support the reimplementation of critical open-source software in memory-safe languages. We previously…

U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week seized the darkweb site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charged in a Florida court. The victim shaming site maintained by the NetWalker ransomware group, after being seized by authorities this week. NetWalker is a ransomware-as-a-service crimeware product in which affiliates rent access to the continuously updated malware code in exchange for a percentage of any funds extorted from victims. The crooks behind NetWalker used the now-seized website to publish personal and proprietary data stolen from their prey, as part of a public pressure campaign to convince victims to pay up. NetWalker has been among…

The unprecedented volume of unemployment insurance fraud witnessed in 2020 hasn’t abated, although news coverage of the issue has largely been pushed off the front pages by other events. But the ID theft problem is coming to the fore once again: Countless Americans will soon be receiving notices from state regulators saying they owe thousands of dollars in taxes on benefits they never received last year. One state’s experience offers a window into the potential scope of the problem. Hackers, identity thieves and overseas criminal rings stole over $11 billion in unemployment benefits from California last year, or roughly 10 percent of all such claims the state paid out in 2020, the state’s labor secretary told reporters this week. Another 17 percent of claims — nearly $20 billion more –…

Authorities in the United Kingdom have arrested a 20-year-old man for allegedly operating an online service for sending high-volume phishing campaigns via mobile text messages. The service, marketed in the underground under the name “SMS Bandits,” has been responsible for blasting out huge volumes of phishing lures spoofing everything from COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts to PayPal, telecommunications providers and tax revenue agencies. The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined to name the suspect, but confirmed that the Metropolitan Police Service’s cyber crime unit had detained an individual from Birmingham in connection to a business that supplied “criminal services related to phishing offenses.” The proprietors of the phishing service were variously known on cybercrime forums under handles such as SMSBandits, “Gmuni,” “Bamit9,” and “Uncle Munis.” SMS Bandits offered an SMS phishing…