Google has presented its safety letter to India, which will expand its developments for the detection of frauds and fight scams across the country, the company’s largest market outside the United States.
Digital fraud in India increases. Fraud related to the instant payment system of the Indian Government grew 85% year -on -year About 11 billion Indian rupees ($ 127 million) last year, according to government data. India also saw several cases of digital detention scams, where defrauders come as officials to extort money through video calls and predatory loans applications.
With its safety letter, Google aims to address some of these areas. The company has also launched its Safety Engineering In India, its fourth center after Dublin, Munich and Malaga.
Announced at the Google Summit for India last year, the Security Engineering Center (GSEC) will allow Google to associate with the local community, including the Government, academic and students and small and medium -sized businesses to create solutions to solve cybersecurity, privacy, security and AI problems, said Google VP by Security Engineering Adkins in an interview.
Google has joined with the Cyber Crime Coordination Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (I4C) to raise awareness of cybercrimers, the company said in a blog post. This is based on the company’s existing work, including the launch of its online fraud identification program, Digikavachwhich debuted by 2023 to restrict the harmful effects of malicious financial applications and applications for predatory loans.
With his GSEC in India, Google will focus on three key areas, Adkins told Techcrunch: the phenomenon of online scams and fraud and how people are secure online; the cybersecurity of business, government and critical infrastructure; and building AI responsible.
“These three areas will become part of our Security Charter for India and for the coming years … We want to use the fact that we have the ability to solve what happens in India, near where the users are,” said Adkins.
Globally, Google uses and uses to fight online scams and eliminate millions of ads and ad accounts. The company aims to deploy more widely in India to combat digital fraud.
Google Messages, which is pre -installed on many Android devices, uses the detection of scams with II, which has helped to protect users from more than 500 million suspects a month. In the same way, Google piloted his protect game In India last year, he claims that he has blocked about 60 million attempts to install high -risk applications, leading to the stoppage of more than 220,000 unique applications in more than 13 million devices. Google Pay, which is One of the main payment applications based on UPI In the country, he also showed 41 million warnings against transactions that were suspected of being possible.
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Adkins, a founding member of the Google Security Team who has been part of the Internet company for more than 23 years, discussed several topics during an interview with Techcrunch:
Adkins said that something more important is the use and misuse of the AI by malicious actors.
“ Obviously we follow the AI very closely and so far, we have mostly seen the great models of language such as twins that the twins used as improvements in productivity. For example, to make fishing scams a little more effective, especially if the actor and the goal have different languages; they can use the translation benefit to make scams more creitive with deep falls, images, video, etc. ”
Adkins said Google performs broad testing of their AI models to ensure that they understand what they should not do.
“This is important for content generated that may be detrimental, but also actions that can be done,” said Akins.
Google works in frames, including the Framework ai safeto restrict the abuse of its Gemini models. However, to protect the AI generative of being misused and abused by pirates in the future, the company sees the need for a framework to create security for the communication of various agents.
“The industry is moving very, very quickly (doing) protocols. It is almost like the first days of the Internet, where everyone releases the real -time code, and we are thinking of security after the fact,” said Adkins.
Google does not want to introduce its own frameworks to limit the extent of the generation that hackers are abused. Instead, Adkins said that the company works with the research community and developers.
“One of the things you don’t want to do is restrict -too much in the first days of search,” said Adkins.
In Surveillance Sellers
Beside the potential of the generation of abuse by pirates computer scientists, Adkins believes that commercial surveillance vendors as an important threat. These may include spy program makers, including NSO Groupthat is Infamous for their pegasus spywareor other small companies that sell surveillance tools.
“These are the companies that are around the world and develop and sell a piracy platform,” said Adkins. “You could pay $ 20, you could pay $ 200,000, only according to the sophistication of the platform and allow you to climb attackers without any experience on your own.”
Some of these sellers also sell their tools spy the people of the markets, including India. However, apart from being run by surveillance tools, the country has its own unique challenges in part because of its size. The country not only sees the defenses and frauds of cloning of the voice directed by Ia, but also of cases of Digital arrestsThat Adkins underlines are only regular scams adapted for the digital world.
“You can see how quickly the threat actors are moving away … I love studying cybernetically in this region for this. It is often a hint of what we will see worldwide at some point,” said Adkins.
In authentication of various factors
Google has been encouraged users for some time to use more safe authentication methods beyond passwords to protect their online presence. The company activated the authentication of several factors (MFA) for all user accounts in the past and also promotes the safety keys based on hardware, which Adkins mentioned by pointing to its employees using their laptops actively. Without password is it too Become a popular technological termwith various meanings.
However, waiting for people to leave passwords in a market like India is difficult due to their wide demographics and diverse economic landscape.
“We knew for a long time that passwords were not safe. This concept of multi-facing authentication was a step forward,” said Adkins, who added that the Indians probably favor SMS-based authentication to other MFA options.
