Google Cloud Integrates Crypto-Mining Malware Defense

Google Cloud has developed a Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), which will help protect users from threats such as malware that mines crypto currency on a compromised account.

A Google blog post details:

“VMTD is a first-to-market detection capability from a major cloud provider that provides agentless memory scanning to help detect threats like crypto-mining malware inside your virtual machines running in Google Cloud.”

VMTD also serves as protection against attacks such as data exfiltration and ransomware, the company said.

The integration of the defense mechanism will follow in the next months. It is initially being rolled out as “public preview.”

In November of 2021, Google revealed that compromised Google Cloud accounts were used by 86% of “malicious actors” to mine crypto.