Yesterday, the 25th of August, Google attended the White House Cyber Security Meeting along with several other big names in tech (such as Apple, Amazon and Microsoft), which US President Joe Biden called to address the continuing wave of cyberattacks across the world that have taken advantage of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Biden met with these tech goliaths to “discuss opportunities to bolster the nation’s cybersecurity in partnership and individually.”
Following the meeting, Google has now committed $10 billion to advance cybersecurity in the US.
Google goes all-in on cybersecurity
“Today, we are announcing that we will invest $10 billion over the next five years to strengthen cybersecurity,” said Google’s Senior Vice President of Global Affairs Kent Walker in an announcement. “We are also pledging, through the Google Career Certificate program, to train 100,000 Americans in fields like IT Support and Data Analytics, learning in-demand skills including data privacy and security.”
In the announcement, Walker explains that there are three key reasons why cybercrime is so rampant at the moment. Firstly, many organisations, rather than utilising newer and better IT practices, rely on legacy software and infrastructure that are riddled with security flaws.
Secondly, cybercriminals can take advantage of security weaknesses in software supply chains (like what happened with Kaseya) vendors don’t have the means to fix. And finally, many countries just don’t have enough people trained well enough to deal with cybersecurity threats of this nature and scale.
To help rectify this, Google is investing in the expansion of the application of its Supply-chain Level Software Artifacts (SLSA) end-to-end framework to protect, “the key components of open-source software” used by a wide variety of organisations. Google’s also committing $100 million towards third-party companies that provide open source security solutions.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, the search engine is, “pledging to help 100,000 Americans earn Google Career Certificates in fields like IT Support and Data Analytics to learn in-demand skills including data privacy and security,” to bolster the US’ cybersecurity force.