Google Releases Beta of Anomaly Detection for G Suite Customers

Google on Wednesday announced the beta availability of Advanced Protection Program for G Suite customers and anomaly detection in the G Suite alert center.

With Advanced Protection for enterprises, admins are provided with the ability to enforce a set of enhanced security policies for those employees who are most at risk for targeted attacks. 

With these new policies, G Suite admins can require the use of security keys for maximum protection against phishing, can automatically block access to non-whitelisted third-party apps, can leverage enhanced email scanning for threats, and can set download protections for certain file types when signed into Google Chrome. 

Expected to roll out to all G Suite editions, Advanced Protection for enterprise should become available in the next several days. 

The Advanced Protection Program includes individual policies that are available to G Suite users outside of this beta. The beta release, however, delivers a bundle of strong account security settings for any organization’s high-risk users, including IT admins, executives, and employees in regulated or high-risk verticals such as finance or government. 

To turn the beta on, G Suite customers simply need to go to Admin console > Security > Advanced Protection Program and select “Enrollment is enabled” for one or more organizational units. 

Once enabled for their domain, users in those organizational units can enroll by going to g.co/advancedprotection. Users will need two security keys to complete enrollment and are required to contact an admin to regain access to their accounts in the event they lose both these security keys. 

The beta of anomalous alert activity for Google Drive ensures that admins with privileges for the alert center for G Suite will receive alerts when potential data exfiltration risks occur, based on unusual behavior, Google says. Admins will also have the option to launch remediation efforts from within the alert center.

The beta program includes two new types of alerts for potential data exfiltration risks, one for unusual sharing behavior to external users, and another for unusual downloading behavior.

The feature is made available to G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education only. G Suite admins looking to sign up for the beta should head over to this page. 

The anomalous alert activity for Google Drive is not rolling out to G Suite Basic, G Suite Business, G Suite for Education, and G Suite for Nonprofits customers.