Securing modern web applications can be a daunting task—doubly so if they are built (quickly) with diverse languages and technology stacks. That’s why we run a multi-faceted product security program, which helps our engineers build and deploy secure software at every stage of the development lifecycle. As part of this effort, we have developed an internal web application security scanning tool, codenamed Inquisition (as no bug expects it!).

The scanner is built entirely on Google technologies like Chrome and Google Cloud Platform, with support for the latest HTML5 features, a low false positive rate and ease of use in mind. We have discussed some of the technology behind this tool in a talk at the Google Testing Automation Conference 2013.

While working on this tool, we found we needed a synthetic testbed to both test our current capabilities and set goals for what we need to catch next. Today we’re announcing the open-source release of Firing Range, the results of our work (with some help from researchers at the Politecnico di Milano) in producing a test ground for automated scanners.

Firing Range is a Java application built on Google App Engine and contains a wide range of XSS and, to a lesser degree, other web vulnerabilities. Code is available on github.com/google/firing-range, while a deployed version is at public-firing-range.appspot.com.

How is it different from the many vulnerable test applications already available? Most of them have focused on creating realistic-looking testbeds for human testers; we think that with automation in mind it is more productive, instead, to try to exhaustively enumerate the contexts and the attack vectors that an application might exhibit. Our testbed doesn’t try to emulate a real application, nor exercise the crawling capabilities of a scanner: it’s a collection of unique bug patterns drawn from vulnerabilities that we have seen in the wild, aimed at verifying the detection capabilities of security tools.

We have used Firing Range both as a continuous testing aid and as a driver for our development, defining as many bug types as possible, including some that we cannot detect (yet!).

We hope that others will find it helpful in evaluating the detection capabilities of their own automated tools, and we certainly welcome any contributions and feedbacks from the broader security research community.

Posted by Claudio Criscione, Security Engineer

A recent poll in the U.S. showed that more people are concerned about being hacked than having their house robbed. That’s why we continue to work hard to keep Google accounts secure. Our defenses keep most bad actors out, and we’ve reduced hijackings by more than 99% over the last few years.

We monitor many potential threats, from mass hijackings (typically used to send lots of spam) to state-sponsored attacks (highly targeted, often with political motivations).

This week, we’re releasing a study of another kind of threat we’ve dubbed “manual hijacking,” in which professional attackers spend considerable time exploiting a single victim’s account, often causing financial losses. Even though they’re rare—9 incidents per million users per day—they’re often severe, and studying this type of hijacker has helped us improve our defenses against all types of hijacking.

Manual hijackers often get into accounts through phishing: sending deceptive messages meant to trick you into handing over your username, password, and other personal info. For this study, we analyzed several sources of phishing messages and websites, observing both how hijackers operate and what sensitive information they seek out once they gain control of an account. Here are some of our findings:

• Simple but dangerous: Most of us think we’re too smart to fall for phishing, but our research found some fake websites worked a whopping 45% of the time. On average, people visiting the fake pages submitted their info 14% of the time, and even the most obviously fake sites still managed to deceive 3% of people. Considering that an attacker can send out millions of messages, these success rates are nothing to sneeze at.

• Quick and thorough: Around 20% of hijacked accounts are accessed within 30 minutes of a hacker obtaining the login info. Once they’ve broken into an account they want to exploit, hijackers spend more than 20 minutes inside, often changing the password to lock out the true owner, searching for other account details (like your bank, or social media accounts), and scamming new victims.

• Personalized and targeted: Hijackers then send phishing emails from the victim’s account to everyone in his or her address book. Since your friends and family think the email comes from you, these emails can be very effective. People in the contact list of hijacked accounts are 36 times more likely to be hijacked themselves. 

• Learning fast: Hijackers quickly change their tactics to adapt to new security measures. For example, after we started asking people to answer questions (like “which city do you login from most often?”) when logging in from a suspicious location or device, hijackers almost immediately started phishing for the answers.

We’ve used the findings from this study, along with our ongoing research efforts, to improve the many account security systems we have in place. But we can use your help too.

• Stay vigilant: Gmail blocks the vast majority of spam and phishing emails, but be wary of messages asking for login information or other personal data. Never reply to these messages; instead, report them to us. When in doubt, visit websites directly (not through a link in an email) to review or update account information.

• Get your account back fast: If your account is ever at risk, it’s important that we have a way to get in touch with you and confirm your ownership. That’s why we strongly recommend you provide a backup phone number or a secondary email address (but make sure that email account uses a strong password and is kept up to date so it’s not released due to inactivity).

• 2-step verification: Our free 2-step verification service provides an extra layer of security against all types of account hijacking. In addition to your password, you’ll use your phone to prove you’re really you. We also recently added an option to log in with a physical USB device.

Take a few minutes and visit the Secure Your Account page, where you can make sure we’ve got backup contact info for you and confirm that your other security settings are up to date.

Posted by Elie Bursztein, Anti-Abuse Research Lead

click to see full-size infographic

Google is committed to increasing the use of TLS/SSL in all applications and services. But “HTTPS everywhere” is not enough; it also needs to be used correctly. Most platforms and devices have secure defaults, but some applications and libraries override the defaults for the worse, and in some instances we’ve seen platforms make mistakes as well. As applications get more complex, connect to more services, and use more third party libraries, it becomes easier to introduce these types of mistakes.

The Android Security Team has built a tool, called nogotofail, that provides an easy way to confirm that the devices or applications you are using are safe against known TLS/SSL vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Nogotofail works for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Chrome OS, OSX, in fact any device you use to connect to the Internet. There’s an easy-to-use client to configure the settings and get notifications on Android and Linux, as well as the attack engine itself which can be deployed as a router, VPN server, or proxy.

We’ve been using this tool ourselves for some time and have worked with many developers to improve the security of their apps. But we want the use of TLS/SSL to advance as quickly as possible. Today, we’re releasing it as an open source project, so anyone can test their applications, contribute new features, provide support for more platforms, and help improve the security of the Internet.

Posted by Chad Brubaker, Android Security Engineer