14 DAY TRIAL // Since a good share of cyber threats spread via phishing schemes, Google has announced it will hike up security by introducing several new features, while also improving the existing ones.
Machine learning seems to be just about Google's favorite technology as of late, so it's no surprise that its early phishing detection system heavily relies on it.
"Machine learning has helped Gmail achieve more than 99% accuracy in spam detection, and with these new protections, we're able to reduce your exposure to threats by confidently rejecting hundreds of millions of additional messages every day," the company said in a blog post.
Google wants to ensure users' security by also implementing click-time warnings for malicious links, as well as warnings against unintended external replies. Furthermore, the company says it has updated its defenses against malicious attachments.
The company claims that in the past years scammers have tried to use dodgy email attachments to sneak past their security filters. Mostly, the company rejected such abuse by rejecting messages and notifying the sender if a virus was detected in an email. They also prevented users from sending messages with infected attachments and prevented them from downloading attachments if a virus was detected.
Protection against unintended external replies
According to Google's announcement, the new release also adds a new Gmail security feature which will warn G Suite users when responding to emails sent from outside of their domains or in their list of contacts.
"This feature can give enterprises protection against forged email messages, impersonation, as well as common user-error when sending mail to the wrong contacts," the company said.
Basically, when replying to an email from someone that works for a different company than yours or who's not in your contact book, you'll see a warning in a special area between the address bar and the text box warning you against sharing sensitive information.
As Google explains it, they will treat secondary domains and domain aliases like primary domains, so users will not be warned when emailing users on a company's own subdomains. Furthermore, if the recipient is intended, the user can dismiss the warning and Gmail will no longer show the warning for that specific recipient.
The feature will be on by default, but it can be turned off from the Admin console control in the Advanced Gmail settings. That means the new tool can be toggled on or off by organizational unit, or for the entire domain.