📢 Google TI Mondays & Month of UNLIMITED UI Searches. Quick reminder that for the entire month of November, all Google Threat Intelligence and VirusTotal customers will benefit from unlimited, uncapped searches when performing manual queries through the web interface (GUI) using the core VirusTotal / GTI search feature. Follow the Google TI Mondays and Month Of GoogleTI Search series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays, #MonthOfGoogleTISearch.

• Hunting LockBit 3.0 ELF Payload
• Tracking Gamaredon Infrastructure
• Geopolitical Hunting: Government Phishing
• Hunting AI Evasion & Prompt Injection
• Hunting Cobalt Strike C2 by User-Agent
• Malware Using Email Channels
• Submit Your Own OSINT to Google TI

💪 Detection highlights. This week, the Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules. We’ve released YARA rules covering 3 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 6 existing families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• HELLCAT.GO: a HELLCAT ransomware variant written in Go that is capable of encrypting files on local and network drives using the RSA and ChaCha20 algorithms. The extension .HC is appended to the file name for each encrypted file. HELLCAT.GO is also capable of spreading to other networked machines, using spot encryption for file types associated with virtual machines, killing specified processes and services, skipping specified files and directories, wiping event logs, and deleting volume shadow copies. It drops a ransom note titled README_HELLCAT.txt after the encryption process is complete.
• SHINYSPIDER: ransomware written in Go that uses RSA and ChaCha20 for encryption. An 8-character extension is generated for each encrypted file, and depending on the file size, files are either partially or fully encrypted. SHINYSPIDER is also capable of encrypting files on local and network drives, spreading to other networked systems, killing specified processes and services, wiping event logs, disabling hooks added by security tools and deleting volume shadow copies.
• ASHCLOUD: a disruption wiper utility and dataminer disguised as a security scan application that scans all connected drives for particular file-types, AES encrypts the file's content using a single AES session key and prepends the AES IV to the encrypted file, RSA encrypts the AES session key with an embedded public key, and exfiltrates the encrypted AES session key as well as the encrypted files to an attacker-controlled Dropbox. Once the data theft routine is complete, or immediately upon receiving a "skip_backup" command from the Telegram C2, ASHCLOUD uses secure deletion algorithms to irreversibly wipe the local files. Additionally, ASHCLOUD provides the ability to execute a command on the victim's system, allowing the attacker to maintain persistence and execute arbitrary system commands via a Telegram bot.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like LOCKBIT, MISTPEN, and SUO5. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 Tagging and Search for Agentic Prompts. Agentic Prompts are reusable query templates within the Agentic conversational AI platform. They allow security analysts to create standardized, structured instructions for the AI agents to automate and accelerate recurring threat investigation, malware analysis, and reporting workflows in Google TI. Users can now assign custom tags when creating or modifying an Agentic prompt. This feature introduces a new, powerful search and filtering capability in the prompt library, allowing analysts to quickly locate prompts based on criteria like Analysis, Briefings, Trends, Vulnerability and New prompts, or any other word from the prompt description.

📢 Google TI Mondays & Month of UNLIMITED UI Searches. Quick reminder that for the entire month of November, all Google Threat Intelligence and VirusTotal customers will benefit from unlimited, uncapped searches when performing manual queries through the web interface (GUI) using the core VirusTotal / GTI search feature. Follow the Google TI Mondays and Month Of GoogleTI Search series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. #GoogleTIMondays, #MonthOfGoogleTISearch.

• VT4Browsers + Google TI
• Hunting Malware with Valid Signatures
• Sigma Hunter: Find the Gaps
• Hunting Recently Registered DGA domains
• Hunting Stealers via PDB Metadata

💪 Detection highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. This week, we’ve released YARA rules for 9 newly tracked malware families and updated existing YARA rules for 31 families. We've also enhanced our configuration extraction platform with updates for 1 existing malware family. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top Google TI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• RAINWIZARD: a Windows backdoor written in Rust. RAINWIZARD uses OneDrive Graph API for command and control. Backdoor capabilities include file download, upload, file listing, command execution using cmd.exe or PowerShell and Windows registry run key modification.
• SAGEWAVE: a launcher written in Java that acts as a servlet filter. SAGEWAVE registers a specific URL pattern to receive attacker traffic over HTTP to a compromised Java web server and expects to receive an encrypted Java class from an attacker in the HTTP request. The payload is decrypted using AES-128-CBC with a hard-coded key and IV and is parsed as a ZIP file. SAGEWAVE loads Java class files into memory from the decrypted ZIP archive, and then executes the "httpReq" method from a class with a filename ending in ".Cli". SAGEWAVE has been observed being dropped by SAGELEAF and is suspected to be used to deploy a payload similar to GOLDTOMB. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• CHARON: a ransomware written in C++ that uses multiple threads to partially encrypt files on the localhost as well as in network shares. Samples have been observed terminating services and processes related to endpoint-agents and backup services. The targeted services belong to software made by eastern and western companies. CHARON samples also include an embedded driver, Dark-Kill, to gain kernel privileges and terminate more tamper-resistant AV and EDR software. See its curated YARA detection rules.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like OXEEYE, DONUT, and UPATRE. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators, including those extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

💡 Remember! Private Scanning + Code Insight. Private Scanning is a dedicated service that allows organizations to submit suspicious files and URLs for analysis while guaranteeing that IoCs, their execution data, and the resulting report remain completely confidential and are not shared publicly / with the community.

• Remember that you can choose between static analysis only or static and dynamic detonation via the "Try to detonate in dynamic analysis sandboxes" checkbox.
• Remember that the Code Insight analysis, which uses Gemini AI to assist malware analysts by generating natural language summaries of a file's functionality, is provided for private file analysis reports whenever possible.

💪 Improved trends visibility via Agentic. Agentic, our nextgen autonomous threat intelligence foundation that delivers instant, contextual, and actionable threat intelligence by fielding complex, natural language queries about security topics, indicators, and entities, has been upgraded to provide immediate visibility into prevalent threat data by running advanced queries to identify top trends over specific periods of time. Examples of supported queries include:

• "Give me the mutexes most used by Emotet in the USA in the last 2 weeks."
• "Give me the vhash most used by APT44 in the last month in the USA."
• "Give me the countries where APT44 has used 035056655d155512e1z14z7dhz1020022fz most in the last month."

🆕 Providing clarity regarding Google TI objects + web citations vs artifact attachments in Agentic. We have improved the organization of contextual data within the Agentic conversations. Instead of a single source button, two new, distinct buttons are now displayed:

• Sources button, at the end of the conversation, dedicated to accessing the Threat Intelligence objects and external web citations used to formulate the conversation responses.
• An attachments button next to the Share one, is now your way to view files and other artifacts uploaded during the conversation.

Sources and artifacts are no longer separated into two tabs. Instead, each item is displayed and accessed via its own dedicated button.

🆕 New outbound 3rd-party integrations. Integrations are vital to operationalizing Google Threat Intelligence (GTI), converting raw security insights into immediate, effective defensive action. These crucial integrations help organizations eliminate siloed data and dramatically enhance their security ecosystem, boosting efficiency and accelerating Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

New integrations released:

• Cyware - See demo here
• Sumologic
• CrowdStrike

💪 AI-enhanced sandbox detonation for deeper behavioral analysis. The Behavior tab within a file's analysis report showcases detailed behavioral insights, which are generated by executing the uploaded file across Google Threat Intelligence's multi-environment sandboxes. We've introduced AI-driven interaction capabilities to our detonation engine. This enhancement allows the sandbox to autonomously click and interact with samples, ensuring they fully execute and reveal their hidden behaviors, resulting in more complete and in-depth behavioral reports. File types affected by this improvement are:

• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• MSC (Microsoft Management Console Snap-ins)
• HTA (Microsoft HTML Applications)
• Emails

See example

💪 IoC Stream Notification Retention Extended to 30 Days. IoC Stream is our IoC centralized notification hub that aggregates all IoCs coming from Livehunt or Retrohunt matches, Threat Profile and Followed Threat Intelligence Objects (Threat Actor, Campaigns, Malware & Software, IoC Collections, Reports, Vulnerabilities) that were updated with new IoCs. The retention period for IoC notifications in the IoC Stream has been significantly increased from 1 week (7 days) to 30 days. This update provides users with a substantially longer historical buffer, offering greater flexibility for data synchronization, analysis, and comprehensive retrospective threat hunting.

📢 Google TI Mondays & Month of UNLIMITED UI Searches. Quick reminder that for the entire month of November, all Google Threat Intelligence and VirusTotal customers will benefit from unlimited, uncapped searches when performing manual queries through the web interface (GUI) using the core VirusTotal / Search feature. Follow the Google TI Mondays and Month Of GoogleTI Search series across our social platforms every week for quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice designed to enhance your efficiency. These actionable tips are essential. Follow us to ensure you never miss the most current intelligence! #GoogleTIMondays, #MonthOfGoogleTISearch,

• Infrastructure, Brand and External Threats
• Hunting Trusted Domain Abuse
• Hunting LNK-triggered Powershell fetches
• Hunting Emerging C2 Infrastructure

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. Over this period, we’ve released YARA rules covering 9 newly tracked malware families, and enhanced our configuration extraction platform to cover 2 existing malware families. Additionally, we've updated YARA rules for 23 other known threats. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• TOXICDUST: a Windows launcher written in C/C++. TOXICDUST is capable of reading a payload file, decoding it by performing bitwise NOT operation and base64, and finally executing the resulting shellcode in memory. TOXICDUST uses SysWhispers2 to perform direct system calls. TOXICDUST is capable of evading AV and EDR software by patching BitDefender Hooking DLL and unhooking NTDLL.DLL. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• EGGJSE: a JScript Encoded dropper. It contains payloads, usually double Base64-encoded, which it decodes, drops, and runs. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• GLOWDISK: a dropper that contains an embedded decoy and executable that it drops to disk and runs. See its curated YARA detection rule .
• PIPEDOWN.DRIVE: a variant of the PIPEDOWN code family. It is a backdoor written in C++ that communicates using the Google Drive API to implement its functionality. Its capabilities include interacting with a hard-coded Google Drive resource to perform file upload, file download, file execution, and performing file listing. See its curated YARA detection rules.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like OXEEYE, BEAVERTAIL, and POISONPLUG.SHADOW. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators and YARA rules for evolving threats, some of which were extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

💪 Enhanced PE and ELF Binary Behavior Detections. CAPA, a tool maintained by the FLARE team , provides human-readable explanations of suspicious behavior that a binary may exhibit when executed. Our platform runs CAPA on all PE and ELF binaries, displaying results in the BEHAVIOR tab of the UI. Lately CAPA has been updated with 22 new and 46 improved behavior detection rules, which have been fully integrated into our supported file analysis process. This enhancement adds new rules heavily focused on detecting defense evasion techniques observed in malware, including:

• behavior_signature:"disable System Restore features via registry on Windows": modify the registry to disable system recovery.
• behavior_signature:"disable system features via registry on Windows": modify the registry to disable administrative tools like Task Manager, Windows Update, and UAC.
• behavior_signature:"disable Device Guard features via registry on Windows": modify the registry to disable virtualization-based security and code integrity policies.
• behavior_signature:"disable Windows Defender features via registry on Windows": modify the registry to disable Windows Defender.
• behavior_signature:"disable firewall features via registry on Windows": modify the registry to disable Windows Firewall.
• behavior_signature:"unload sysmon": unload sysmon minifilter driver to disable Windows System Monitor.
• behavior_signature:"unload minifilter driver": unload minifilter driver to disable kernel functionality.
• behavior_signature:"enter debug mode in .NET": enable debug privileges to manipulate processes.
• behavior_signature:"encrypt data using TripleDES in .NET": encrypt data using the TripleDES algorithm to conceal data.

Check out CAPA’s full release notes for more details.

🆕 Google Threat Intelligence Browser Extension. We evolved the popular VT4Browsers Extension to include the power of Google Threat Intelligence to provide actionable Threat Intelligence directly in your Browser. It empowers analysts with immediate threat context & triage, investigate in-depth without context switching and seamless collaboration & tracking to stay on top of threats, scan downloads all by providing actionable Threat Intelligence directly within your browser.
Now users with a valid Google Threat Intelligence API key can activate a new, integrated investigation experience.

• New Interface: the extension adopts the visual style of the official Google Threat Intelligence interface.
• Live Investigation: IoCs are automatically highlighted/enriched on the page as you navigate, providing a Quick Summary (Hover) and Deep Dive (Click) into the GTI Widget side-panel powered by Google Threat intelligence.
• View Summary of all IoCs: a new feature to automatically collect all the detected IoCs on a webpage and open a new investigation window in the Google TI platform. You can add specific IoCs in this window directly into a new IoC collection to unlock powerful use-cases, to stay on top of the threats.

Want to try the enhanced investigation experience? Download or update the extension now:

• Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge
• Firefox

🆕 Audit Logging. The new Audit Log is an essential security and administrative tool within Google Threat Intelligence, exclusively accessible to Group Administrators. Its primary function is to track, record, and preserve a time-stamped history of all sensitive administrative actions taken across your organization’s Google TI group, covering activities performed via both the web UI and the API.

💪Extended malware configuration extraction with displayed messages. Google Threat Intelligence processes all files submitted to VirusTotal, as well as some other Mandiant/Google sources, and identifies popular malware families, invoking malware configuration extractors where applicable. We’ve updated our extractors to also include any messages displayed back to users, such as ransom notes. See example.

This field has also been indexed and allows you to hunt for specific malware families, for example: malware_config:"guarantee that we won't scam you".

💪 Agentic now has the capability to provide mitigation advice. Our Agentic conversational assistant designed to provide instant, contextual, and actionable threat intelligence by answering complex, natural language queries about security topics, indicators, and entities has been improved to answer specific mitigation strategies and defensive controls related to a given MITRE ATT&CK TTP, CAPEC ID, or CWE ID. This enhancement allows for faster pivoting from threat identification to defense planning by providing immediate, actionable guidance on how to prevent or limit the impact of specific attacker behaviors and vulnerabilities.

📢Google TI Mondays. Tune in every Monday as we share quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice across our social platforms. These knowledge "pills" are designed to boost your efficiency, follow us to make sure you never miss the latest insights!

• Crowdsource Sigma Rules in GoogleThreatIntelligence

📢Month of UNLIMITED UI Searches. Check with VirusTotal / Search is the core searching feature providing access to our platform's massive IoC dataset, enabling users to execute advanced queries with specific modifiers to investigate malware campaigns, track threat actors, and analyze threat infrastructure. In November, all Google TI and VirusTotal customers will enjoy unlimited, uncapped searches when performing manual queries through the web interface (GUI). These searches will not consume any of the customer’s existing search quota.

• Google TI customers: 30 Days of UNLIMITED Searching with Google Threat Intelligence
• VT customers: November is the Month of Searches: Explore, Learn, and Share with #MonthOfVTSearch

💪Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules. Over this past week, we’ve released YARA rules covering 11 newly tracked malware families and updated YARA rules for 20 existing families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• FIREPLUG: a backdoor written in Go that is capable of command execution, file upload and download, traffic relaying using SOCKS5 and port forwarding. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• WAVESHAPER: a backdoor written in C++ supports downloading and executing arbitrary payloads from the C2. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• LOSTSEA: a downloader that sets persistence by scheduling a task named IconCache. It collects and sends basic system information like user and hostname to the command and control (C2 or C&C) server. The response is expected to be an encoded next-stage payload. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• CHROMEPUSH: a dataminer written in C/C++ that targets multiple browsers (Chrome, Brave, Arc, Edge) and steals sensitive data, including screen captures, browser cookies, and keylogger data. It is also capable of installing a malicious Chrome browser extension. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• UDPSHELL: a Linux backdoor written in C. UDPSHELL communicates with command and control server using QUIC protocol. The backdoor capabilities include shell command execution, file upload and download, SOCKS5 proxy. See its curated YARA detection rule.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like DONUT, CHINACHOP, and POSHC2. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 Enhanced Clarity and Accessibility of Registration Data with RDAP Format. The Whois lookup information in IP addresses and domains analysis reports provides deep insight into the registration, ownership, and administrative contacts for both IoC types. It is a crucial component for threat intelligence and incident response, allowing analysts to pivot investigations based on infrastructure ownership. We have introduced support for the standardized Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) to enhance the information provided from Whois lookups. It provides registration data in a machine-readable, standardized format (JSON), leading to greater data consistency and easier automated processing. See example.

🆕 URL Private Scan check for Public Report availability. The Private Scanning feature allows users to analyze URLs in a dedicated, private environment. This is essential for inspecting sensitive URLs and performing in-depth analysis, such as interactive sandbox detonation, without contributing the results to the public corpus. The platform now provides an immediate notification when a public report for a requested URL is already available, right before initiating a private scan. This allows users to decide whether they still require a private scan for specific reasons (e.g., interact with the sandbox during URL detonation or configuring a certain browser agent), or if the public report is sufficient, thereby preserving their Private Scanning quota.

💪 Enhanced GTI Scoring with Human-Verified Intelligence to reduce False Positives/False Negatives. The GTI Score is a proprietary, unified risk assessment metric that objectively quantifies an indicator's (file, URL, domain, IP) maliciousness for fast decision-making and alert prioritization. The model has been significantly improved by incorporating manual analysis insights from the ATI (Advanced Threat Intelligence) team, which systematically corrects edge cases, thus reducing False Positives (FP) and improving False Negatives (FN) coverage for a more accurate score.

🆕 Agentic now uses existing detections and generates new YARA-L rules. Agentic, our conversational AI platform powered by Google Threat Intelligence (TI), now features enhanced YARA-L rule generation capability. This improvement is driven by Agentic's streamlined access to our comprehensive library of existing detection rules, enabling the creation of more sophisticated and precise new rules for countering complex threats and ensuring reliable resources for rapid threat response. After you prompt the agent to create a new YARA-L rule (to track a specific threat or malware family), the interface gives you the power to act right away to:

• Copy the rule content.
• Download the rule file locally.

Leverage our entire dataset to massively boost your detection power, then integrate the results into Google SecOps in minutes.

📢 Google TI Mondays. Tune in every Monday as we share quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice across our social platforms. These knowledge "pills" are designed to boost your efficiency, follow us to make sure you never miss the latest insights!

• Introducing Agentic, an AI-powered assistant for Google Threat Intelligence

💪 Detection Highlights. The Google Threat Intelligence Group and FLARE team consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. Over this period, we've released YARA rules covering 8 newly tracked malware families, and provided updates to YARA rules for 20 existing families and configuration extractors for 2 existing families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

As we track new malware families found through our research, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• BADTILE: a .NET based file utility that connects to a remote server via HTTP-Dmtp. It can accept tasking to transfer a file, send a Dmtp handshake to ping a specified client, and perform a system survey. BADTILE also has the ability to use TCP-Dmtp. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• SYSTEMBC.PERL: a tunneler written in Perl that retrieves proxy-related commands from a command-and-control (C2 or C&C) server using a custom binary protocol over TCP. A C2 server directs SYSTEMBC.PERL to act as a proxy between the C2 server and a remote system. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• FARCRY: an XMPP chat backdoor that communicates over the GoogleTalk service. It is capable of encrypted file transfers and remote command execution. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• DAYSHROUD: a backdoor written in C++ built using Neutralinojs. This backdoor functions as a wrapper for JavaScript code, as well as other resources, contained within the other file extracted by Calendaromatic.exe. This backdoor disguises itself as a desktop calendar application called Calendaromatic, but utilizes stenography to covertly download and execute additional JavaScript code in hidden holiday data. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• OILPEN: a backdoor. It creates itself as a service to establish persistence. OILPEN has capabilities to include: reading and writing files, uninstalling itself, and updating its configuration file. See its curated YARA detection rule.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like CHUNKPILE, SQUIDGATE, and SQUIDSLEEP. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators for these evolving threats, leveraging both YARA rules and configuration extraction systems.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base and the complete list of curated YARA rules in our database.

🆕 CAPE sandbox executable payload extraction and feedback loop. Google Threat Intelligence detonates files in multiple home-grown and 3P sandboxes. Our CAPE-derived sandboxes classify samples through automated dynamic malware unpacking and subsequent YARA-based classification of the captured, unpacked payloads. We now automatically extract and submit these unpacked payloads to the platform for separate detonation. This process creates explicit relationships between the parent file and the extracted payloads, and tags the payloads with payload tag for easy identification.

A new tag search modifier, tag:payload, is now available to help you efficiently manage and search for unpacked payloads.

The web interface also displays these relationships:

• When viewing a packed file (parent) analysis report, you will find the unpacked payloads listed under the RELATIONS tab -> Payload Files.
• When viewing an unpacked payload analysis report, you will find its packed parent under the RELATIONS tab -> Payload Parents.

This representation of new relationships is replicated in the API: use the payload_parents relationship to get parent files and payloads_extracted to get unpacked files. See example.

Stay tuned, soon we will use this process to better characterize and provide more explainability on the parent/packed files.

💪 Agentic now answers documentation related questions. Agentic, our conversational AI platform powered by Google TI, instead of relying solely on static training data, employs Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This technique allows the agent to dynamically retrieve the most relevant and up-to-date threat intelligence from all our sources (VirusTotal, Mandiant finished intelligence, industry/community reports, Safe Browsing, GTI-G threat actor knowledge base, etc). Agentic is constantly evolving. We've added our comprehensive documentation portal as a new data source for RAG. This ensures Agentic can now provide answers that are fully consistent with our latest product features and guidelines.

With this improvement you can now:

• Ask Agentic about the product and available features:
  • “What are threat profiles? Why should I use them?”
• Discover API functionality:
  • “How can I download feeds using Google Threat Intelligence API?”
  • “What threat lists are available for consumption?”
• Ask Agentic to API generate scripts:
  • “Can you help me generate a Python script to consume Threat Lists?”
  • “Can you demonstrate how to fetch IoCs for a specific threat actor with a Python script?”

🆕 Submit Your Own OSINT Articles to be processed by Google TI. OSINT (community/industry) articles in Google TI are automatically ingested from a set of trusted sources. They act as a powerful source of Threat Intelligence, transforming vast amounts of public threat data into actionable, contextualized insights that security teams can use for proactive defense and strategic planning. Users can now use the Submit your OSINT button in the Reports & Analysis left navbar menu option to share the URL. Upon submission, the system automatically processes the article to:

• Extract categorization fields (e.g., associated threat actor, malware families, targeted region, and industry) for reports where this information can be confidently identified.
• Generate a summary of the content via Gemini.
• Extract all mentioned IoCs (files, URLs, domains, IPs).
• Generate relationships between the new report object and other Threat Intelligence objects.

Additionally, users can track the history and status of their submissions in the new MY OSINT tab.

🆕 New Code Insight code analysis endpoint for automation. We’ve launched a new Code Insight endpoint that significantly reduces reverse engineering workload by providing analysts with an AI assistant that instantly returns natural language descriptions of code functionality and supports analysis chaining to accelerate time-to-verdict. See example here and our dedicated post. This endpoint is used by our very own VIrusTotal IDA Pro plugin, powering summaries and descriptions of functions.

Google TI Mondays. Tune in every Monday as we share quick, actionable practitioner tips and product adoption advice across our social platforms. These content "pills" are designed to boost your efficiency, so follow us to make sure you never miss the latest insights!

• YARA in Google Threat Intelligence: Hunting Beyond Files

Threat Hunting with Google Threat Intelligence - Episode 5. If you missed our latest webinar on how AI is transforming threat hunting? You can now watch the full recording at your convenience! Catch up on all the major announcements, including how AI is making investigations more effective in less time than ever before. In the webinar, we:

• Unveiled the groundbreaking Agentic Platform (now in public preview).
• Demoed the Ransomware Data Leaks dashboard for fresh insights into extortion trends.
• Showcased Code Insight, our AI-powered tool that converts complex code into clear, natural-language explanations.

Watch the Webinar On Demand Now: English version, Spanish version

Detection Highlights. Google Threat Intelligence consistently updates our YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. Over the past week, we've released YARA rules covering multiple malware families, and expanded our configuration extraction platform to cover new malware families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top Google TI search trends.

As we track new malware families found during Mandiant investigations, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• DEEPBREATH: data miner written in Swift that targets macOS systems. It manipulates the Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) database to gain broad file system access, enabling it to steal credentials from the system keychain; browser data from Chrome, Brave, and Edge; and user data from two different versions of Telegram and Apple Notes. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• New rules for SOGU.SEC, a variant of the SOGU backdoor. It can extract sensitive system information, upload and download files, and execute a remote command shell. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• NOROBOT: downloader utility which retrieves the next stage from a hardcoded C2 address and prepares the system for the final payload. It has been observed undergoing regular development from May through September 2025. The earliest version of NOROBOT made use of cryptography in which the key was split across multiple components and needed to be recombined in a specific way in order to successfully decrypt the final payload. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• BRICKSTEAL: credential stealer written in Java. It is deployed by a JSP dropper and masquerades as a legitimate VMware vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) component, using the package name com.vmware.identity. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• COLDCOPY: a ClickFix lure which masquerades as a custom CAPTCHA. COLDCOPY prompts the target to download and execute a DLL using rundll32, while trying to disguise itself as a CAPTCHA by including text to verify that the user is not a robot. See its curated YARA detection rule.
• YESROBOT: Python backdoor which uses HTTPS to retrieve commands from a hardcoded C2. The commands are AES encrypted with a hardcoded key. System information and username are encoded in the User-Agent header of the request. See its curated YARA detection rules.
• MAYBEROBOT: toehold Powershell backdoor. It uses a hardcoded C2 and a custom protocol that supports 3 commands: download and execute from a specified URL, execute the specified command using cmd.exe, and execute the specified Powershell block. It is likely a more flexible replacement for YESROBOT. See its curated YARA detection rules.

See latest malware family profiles added to the knowledge base.

New MITRE ATT&CK map view for file behavior analysis. The MITRE ATT&CK Tactics and Techniques section in the file behavior report has been upgraded from a list view to an interactive, visual map. This new interface displays the detected TTPs using a color-coded matrix, allowing you to instantly visualize the tactics used across the execution chain, just like a heat map in the MITRE Navigator. You can also use new filters by severity (info, low, medium, high) to focus on the most relevant or severe techniques. By simply clicking on the TTP card, you can then visualize the specific commands or activities (the Procedures) associated with that technique. See example.

New render rule fluid UI component in Agentic to easily interact with Livehunt and Retrohunt. Agentic, the conversational AI platform grounded in Google Threat Intelligence's comprehensive security dataset, has already seen improvements during its first week in public preview. It now includes detection rule retrieval and deployment. You can ask the agent to provide crowdsourced or curated detection rules (such as YARA rules) to track a specific threat or malware family. When a curated YARA rule is returned, the interface provides immediate actions, allowing you to:

• Import the rule directly into your Retrohunt or Livehunt environment.
• Copy the rule content.
• Download the rule file locally.

New render MITRE Tree fluid UI component in Agentic. A new rendering tool was added to the Agentic platform to display TTP analysis in a visual MITRE ATT&CK map, similar to the visualization in the file behavior reports. When you ask Agentic to provide a TTPs matrix of a threat actor, the output is no longer a simple text list, but rather an interactive map where you can filter TTPs by severity (info, low, medium, high). This visualization also includes two key metrics not available in a file behavior tab, because in this case the metrics come from several files, specifically from all the files associated to the threat actor from the image below:

• Prevalence: Shows how globally common the technique is.
• Matches: Indicates the number of files related to the threat actor whose behaviour analysis detected any of the procedures within each technique.

New OpenID Connect (OIDC) Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication support. Google TI offers a robust Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism to secure and facilitate users authentication through organization’s identity provider (IdP) via SAML protocol. We are now expanding this capability by incorporating OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication layer built on top of OAuth 2.0, increasing flexibility and security of the authentication process.

Core use cases and best practices for Google Threat Intelligence. We have added a dedicated Use Cases and Other Resources section to the official Google TI documentation. This section provides detailed guidance on how to leverage the platform's tools and data for core security workflows, including:

• Advanced Hunting: searching for suspicious activity using entity pivoting and investigative tools.
• Incident Response: accelerating investigations with enriched indicators and threat actor context.
• Phishing & Brand Monitoring: identifying domain abuse and impersonation campaigns. Vulnerability Management: prioritizing vulnerabilities using real-world exploitation data.

New API endpoint for Org/Group consumption by user and feature. We created a new API endpoint designed for Org/Group administrators to gain detailed visibility into their organization's usage. This endpoint retrieves consumption metrics for a group's various features, broken down by individual user, covering both UI (Web Interface) and API usage, for a time range spanning the current month and the two previous months, providing essential historical context. Check out the endpoint documentation and examples at the bottom.

VirusTotal’s analysis with Hugging Face’s AI Hub. As AI adoption grows, we see familiar threats taking new forms, from tampered model files and unsafe dependencies to data poisoning and hidden backdoors. These risks are part of the broader AI supply chain challenge, where compromised models, scripts, or datasets can silently affect downstream applications. We are now scanning Hugging Face models and flagging unsafe models, read more.

Latest learning materials published:

• VTPRACTITIONERS{SEQRITE}: Tracking UNG0002, Silent Lynx and DragonClone
• JA4 fingerprinting in GTI
• Advanced Threat Hunting: Automating Large-Scale Operations with LLMs

Google TI Mondays. We are publishing concise product knowledge pills on our social channels every Monday. These are practitioner tips and product adoption boosters, check out our latest content and don't forget to follow us:

• Dynamic analysis with Google Threat Intelligence.
• Threat Profile in Google Threat Intelligence.
• Advanced search modifiers cheat sheet.
• YARA in action.
• Scale your file hunts with YARA.

Detection Highlights. The FLARE team and Google Threat Intelligence Group consistently update Google TI's YARA rules and malware configuration extractors. Over Q3, we've released YARA rules covering 345 newly tracked malware families, and expanded our configuration extraction platform to cover 15 new malware families. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, Google SecOps customer environments, and top Google TI search trends.

As we track new malware families found during Mandiant investigations, we build and release detection signatures. Some recent examples include:

• HAMMERDROP: This malware is used to drop Windows drivers to bypass endpoint security solutions and has been found in ransomware investigations.
• SELFDRIVE: This Node.js malware has been observed being distributed with trojanized software installers and downloads and executes additional Javascript files.
• TOOLSHELL: This webshell has been observed being installed onto on-premise servers that were exploited by an attacker.

In addition to providing detection rules for new and emerging threats, we continue to update our detection systems for threats like QUASARRAT, WARZONE, and SHADOWLADDER. These updates ensure you have the latest indicators that were extracted by our configuration extraction systems.

Google TI Score enhancements. We have significantly enhanced the Google Threat Intelligence (GTI) Score to improve your threat prioritization and triage efficiency. The updated score now incorporates new contextual factors like threat actor motivation and malware family roles for all IoC types (files, URLs, domains and IP addresses). Furthermore, network IoCs benefit from more granular threat categories based on crowdsourced insights, and URL severity is boosted by detailed data from Google Webrisk. This refinement, including more granular severity levels for suspicious indicators, ensures you can prioritize potential threats more efficiently.

Threat Profiles now generally available (GA). All Threat Profiles in legacy experience migrated to the new look and feel. Includes automatic and holistic visibility of relevant threats, flexible curation to tune and incorporate your own threat intelligence artifacts, enhanced collaboration and sharing, and tactical actionability via out of the box detections and tailored + recent IOC feeds. Now they also provide quick access to an overview explanation of each threat and a scatter plot designed to help you prioritize threats by instantly showing a threat's global prevalence versus its specific relevance within the confines of the dimensions of a given threat profile. Learn more in this webinar.

Google TI Agentic public preview. Built on Large Language Models (LLMs) and grounded in Google Threat Intelligence's comprehensive security dataset, the Agentic Platform simplifies and democratizes threat intelligence. This conversational interface lets you interact directly with specialized AI agents to quickly analyze threats, accelerate security investigations, and receive immediate, precise answers. It was released as a public preview to Enterprise and Enterprise+ customers.

Code Insight now supports SWF and SVG file types. Code Insight is an advanced, Gemini AI-driven capability that serves as an automated assistant for malware analysts and reverse engineers. It uses artificial intelligence to generate natural language summaries that clearly describe a file's intent and overall functionality. We've extended it to support more file formats such as SWF and SVG.

Code Insight experimentation with executables. We continue experimentation with Windows Executables, Linux Executables and OS X Executables and are now ramping up the volume of files processed. Examples:

• Windows Executable
• OS X Executable
• Linux Executable
• Search for terms within Code Insight: type:peexe codeinsight:infostealer p:5+

New Crowdsourced AI Contributor: Exodia Labs. The new Exodia Labs integration adds an independent AI analysis stream for Chrome extension (.CRX) files, complementing Code Insight by providing a clear security verdict and detailed reports that outline suspicious actions (like credential theft), with all results fully searchable via new platform operators. Results from Exodia Labs are fully searchable by using the exodialabs_ai_verdict:malicious | suspicious | benign or exodialabs_ai_analysis:<keywords> search modifiers, allowing users to pivot across and find large campaigns of malicious Chrome extensions. See example report. See example search.

Private collection sharing across organizations. Private collections allows users to create a "container" for artifacts like indicators that then inherit automated associations, analytics, telemetry and additional actions. We have extended the functionality so that customers may now share threat information like indicators across trusted circles – i.e. users that are not part of their current organization. Note, you will need to identify and add either the Google TI organization name or username directly in order to share with others outside of your organization.

Multi-CVE search. Google TI's CVE cards offer crucial information on individual vulnerabilities such as severity, risk rating, exploitation state, and exploit availability. This data helps organizations prioritize patching and mitigation efforts by providing empirical risk scoring. The new multi-search functionality significantly improves workflow efficiency by allowing users to quickly gather and compare intelligence on several CVEs in parallel, streamlining the process of tracking widespread threats by allowing users to add multiple vulnerabilities to a threat profile for consolidated tracking. Similarly, multi-CVE search allows security analysts to prioritize a list of vulnerabilities that may have been identified by 3P tools based on in-the-wild exploitation and thus impact likelihood. See example.

New curated GTI-G/Mandiant authored hunting YARA rules. YARA Rules are a powerful, pattern-matching tool used by security professionals to identify and classify malware and suspicious files. We are now including a new set of Hunting YARA Rules within our published Google Threat Intelligence threat Reports, that are easily recognized by their naming convention, which always starts with "G_Hunting_". These rules are designed to help your team uncover activity potentially related to a specific attack technique or malware, providing initial detections that require further verification to confirm malicious intent. Think of them as an extra tool for deeper searching, helping you find more subtle signs of a threat in your environment and stay ahead of emerging risks. See example.

Enhanced dynamic analysis / sandbox capabilities. Files uploaded to Google Threat Intelligence are executed across multiple sandboxes to generate detailed behavioral insights in the analysis report's Behavior tab of the UI. On this front we have many announcements:

• New file type supported. Added support for ELF shared objects with an entrypoint detonation.
• Enhanced detonations. Improved analysis and reporting for the following filetypes:
  • VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
  • SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
  • MSC (Microsoft Management Console Snap-ins)
  • MSHTA, HTA (Microsoft HTML Applications)
• New OS versions deployed in the Zenbox sandbox. Windows 11 and Android 13.
• We've expanded our file detonation capabilities by adding the Google Safe Browsing sandbox to our dynamic analysis systems. See example.
• AI registry key summary. We've incorporated an AI-powered explanation to help users quickly understand the impact, intent and significance of the reported registry-related actions. See example.

New integrations and implementation/dev kits. Integrations are absolutely crucial for operationalizing Google Threat Intelligence and transforming raw insights into immediate defensive action. We are fully committed to breaking down these silos and significantly improving our integration ecosystem to drive efficiency and speed up your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

• New integrations released:
  • ServiceNow SOAR integration for Google TI (Google Threat Intelligence for SecOps)
  • Google TI integration for OpenCTI
  • Google TI integration for Anomali ThreatStream
  • New Google TI integration for ThreatQ
• Integration updates:
  • Google Threat Intelligence App for ServiceNow Vulnerability Response
• Adoption, implementation and customer enablement:
  • Detailed MISP install and usage guide to ensure faster and smoother deployments improving time-to-value.
  • Google TI Integration Dev Kit Released. Provides example scripts and guidance for custom workflows. This is designed to accelerate your technical discussions and streamline the process of solution design.

Ransomware data leaks dashboard. According to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Google Cloud (The Threat Intelligence Benchmark), ransomware/multifaceted extortion continues to be one of the threats/attacks that cybersecurity leaders are most concerned about as they look out into the next 12 months. Google Threat Intelligence tracks and documents hundreds of ransomware malware families in its threat landscape module, provides ransomware-specific threat lists/feeds, alerts on ransomware activity against your organization via its Digital Threat Monitoring module, allows you to search through its malware corpus for ransomware variants to dissect, and much more. In addition to this functionality, The Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG, formerly Mandiant Intelligence) tracks numerous data leak sites (DLS) dedicated to releasing victim data following data theft extortion incidents, with or without ransomware deployment, in which victims refuse to pay a ransom demand. These websites are intended to pressure victims to pay the ransom demand or give threat actors additional leverage during ransom negotiations. We are now exposing this data to our users via the new Ransomware data leaks dashboard to provide insights into the extortion ecosystem.

Multi-tenancy in Google Threat Intelligence. We are pleased to announce the general availability of multi-tenancy for Google Threat Intelligence. This new architecture supports the creation of multiple distinct GTI sub-orgs, known as "tenants," under a single parent account, ensuring each tenant's data and configurations are securely segmented. Key features include:

• Tenant Isolation: Each tenant is an isolated entity, ensuring that data and configurations are not shared or viewable by other tenants.
• Centralized Management: Parent organizations can get an overview of their tenants, while each tenant maintains its own independent GTI environment.
• Flexible Onboarding: Supports various onboarding scenarios, including adopting existing GTI customers as tenants or creating new "organic" tenants that share the parent's quota.

Note that multi-tenancy is not intended to overcome limitations with RBAC or ACLs, if you are facing limitations on those fronts, please file a feature request.

Sharepoint vulnerability checks in ASM. On-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers are currently facing widespread, active exploitation due to multiple vulnerabilities. Threat actors have been observed chaining CVE-2025-53770 with an authentication bypass vulnerability, CVE-2025-49706, in an exploit chain codenamed "ToolShell". This chain is used to deploy ASPX web shells using PowerShell. The primary post-exploitation objective is to steal the server's MachineKey, which enables adversaries to forge __VIEWSTATE payloads for persistent access and lateral movement. GTI reacted in a timely fashion implementing the pertinent vulnerability checks in our attack surface management module. This check goes far beyond a CPE match, the check tries to inject an unharmful marker in a SharePoint component, If in the SharePoint server response this marker is found, the host is marked as potentially vulnerable.

New Integrations for Elastic, IBM QRadar, and Splunk. We have extended Google Threat Intelligence (GTI) capabilities with new, dedicated integrations across key security platforms. These updates allow security teams to seamlessly leverage GTI's comprehensive threat intelligence within their existing ecosystems, providing deeper context, powerful automation, and a more proactive security posture.

• Elastic. A new integration is now available to facilitate the direct ingestion of GTI feeds. This allows you to continuously analyze your security telemetry against Google's high-fidelity Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) to enhance threat detection and analysis within your Elastic environment.
• IBM QRadar. We have released two new extensions for IBM QRadar. QRadar SIEM enriches threat detection by correlating your internal security data with GTI's real-world intelligence. This provides deeper context for events and helps security analysts more accurately identify and prioritize critical threats. QRadar SOAR delivers powerful automation and orchestration for your incident response workflows. This integration allows you to ingest and sync back Attack Surface Management (ASM) issues and Digital Threat Monitoring (DTM) alerts, ingest IOC streams to enrich incidents with detailed context, including malware families, threat actor profiles, and sandbox analysis reports.
• Splunk SOAR. A new application for Splunk SOAR enables robust automation and enrichment for your security operations. It provides a rich set of playbook actions, including the ability to scan files and URLs, retrieve detailed reports for IPs, domains, and hashes, and automatically enrich artifacts with critical context from Google's vast threat database.

These integrations build upon the hundreds of technology integrations already available for Google Threat Intelligence.

Threat Profiles 2.0 Preview. Threat Profiles allows users to focus on the threats that matter most to them based on varying dimensions like customer’s industry, location of operation, source regions, targeted regions, etc. We have been hard at work moving Threat Profile to the new single unified UX surface, as part of that, Threat Profile is receiving major improvements:

• Complete visibility: gain comprehensive insights with automated recommendations across all GTI content, including Mandiant, partner and community intelligence.
• Enhanced collaboration: share threat profiles with your team members as editors and viewers, fostering a collaborative environment for focusing on priority threats.
• Automated operationalization: automatically generate custom IOC feeds for swift actionability, enabling focused threat hunting and detection in your environment.
• Deeper customization: tailor threat profiles with expanded dimensions such as actor motivation, source country, and malware categories, aligning with your unique threat model.
• Actionable insights: utilize the MITRE TTP analysis tool to understand tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and analyze relevant reports from Mandiant and other trusted sources.
• Workflow automation: leverage API accessibility to create, manage, and set up alerts for changes to your threat profiles.
• Unlimited profiles: Google TI Enterprise and Enterprise+ tiers now enjoy unlimited threat profiles.

The new threat profile is accesible here, we are early in the journey and are looking for for feedback to continue shaping the evolution of GTI's relevance driving engine.

New prioritization visualization in Vulnerability Intelligence cards. GTI is a holistic threat intelligence suite that covers all use cases and data types. Its Vulnerability Intelligence modules allows users to implement smart patching programs by focusing their resources on addressing vulnerabilities that are actively being weaponized or exploited in-the-wild. Vulnerability knowledge cards now include a clear visualization communicating the risk rating. This rating is derived from factors such as in-the-wild exploitation status, exploit availability, and overall exploitation state, empowering users to make smarter, threat-driven prioritization decisions.

Advanced network configuration options for URL analysis. Similar to the enhanced network environment control introduced for file sandbox detonation, users can now leverage advanced Internet connection options during URL analysis in the interactive sandbox environment. This provides granular control to simulate various network conditions for comprehensive analysis and to prevent cloaking.

User agent selection in Private Scanning. Malicious websites or servers often present different content or behaviors to a user based on their browser "user agent" string. To overcome this common cloaking technique users can now choose among a set of user agents or provide their own custom string:

URL analysis report deletion in Private Scanning. Private Scanning allows its users to analyze URLs and files in a non-shareable fashion, including reputational analysis, static analysis, dynamic analysis in sandboxes and vetting with {YARA, Sigma, IDS} rules. User's have always been able to delete both scanned files and their associated reports at any point in time, including before their TTL specified at upload time. Users can now also delete submitted URLs at any time post-submission.

Google Threat Intelligence MCP Server for Google Unified Security. At RSA 2025 we announced the open-sourcing of MCP servers for Google Unified Security. As part of such announcement we released runnable Python MCP server examples for Google Threat Intelligence, providing standardized AI access to Google's frontline threat intelligence on indicators of compromise, threat actors, and campaigns. You can find the GitHub repository here, it includes the Google Threat Intelligence MCP server. It was never easier to build workflows leveraging our vast intelligence.

Google Threat Intelligence integration widget for third-party products / interfaces (Preview). Inspired by VirusTotal's VT AUGMENT widget, the GTI widget is an official, compliant, and recommended way to integrate VirusTotal data into third-party applications. Essentially, it's a tool that allows developers and security vendors to embed the rich threat intelligence and analysis capabilities of Google Threat Intelligence directly into their own platforms, security products, or dashboards. Forget about engineering heavy lifting to enrich indicators of compromise (IPs, URLs, domains, files / hashes), GTI seamlessly serves a UI component that is ready to be integrated in 3rd-party interfaces, this component can be custom styled to match your own interface.

📘

Access a demo of the GTI widget here.

Generating the GTI widget is exclusively available to GTI customers. The process involves two steps: first, an ephemeral URL must be generated, and second, this URL is then used within your user interface.

GET https://www.virustotal.com/api/v3/gtiwidget?query=630325cac09ac3fab908f903e3b00d0dadd5fdaa0875ed8496fcbb97a558d0da

Where the query can be a sha256 file hash, a domain, an IPv4 address or an url. This step is usually done in the 3rd-party product backend and it requires a GTI API key to call the endpoint. Response example:

{
  "data": {
    "id": "630325cac09ac3fab908f903e3b00d0dadd5fdaa0875ed8496fcbb97a558d0da",
    "type": "file",
    "url": "https://www.virustotal.com/gtiwidget/ABMXx8NjMwMzI1Y2FjMDlhYzNmYWI5MDhmOTAzZTNiMDBkMGRhZGQ1ZmRhYTA4NzVlZDg0OTZmY2JiOTdhNTU4ZDBkYXx8ZmlsZXx8djN8fDE3NDI5ODAzMjF8fDY5ZjZlYjI4ODNiNDdiOTc0ZjJkZGExMjU0OGJhNjkyMzdjODY1NTA1NzM0NDA1ZmJhZTdhNDAwNTRjMTY1OWU"
	}
}

This URL is valid for 24 hours and does not require any kind of authentication to call it.

The second call involves embedding the widget in your own interface via an iframe:

For optimal display of the widget, a width of 900px is recommended. The widget includes both dark and light themes. The dark theme is the default. To use the light theme, include the query parameter theme=light in the API call. Similarly, the widget allows advanced style customization. Please reach out to us should you want to dive deeper into the GTI widget during this preview phase.

RBAC controls: ASM NO ACCESS GTI is a vast suite addressing all threat intelligence use cases, including Digital Risk Protection and Attack Surface Management. Indeed, Attack Surface Management is eventually the module that allows us to understand your Internet exposed assets and identify which threats should matter the most based on this understanding. We do acknowledge that attack surface management is not always a responsibility of CTI teams and may often identify sensitive information such as exploitable assets. To adhere to strong security practices and enforce the principle of least privilege, we are rolling out a new RBAC control to restrict access to ASM.

Malware detection highlights. In our ongoing effort to enhance malware detection capabilities in Google Threat Intelligence, we've significantly expanded coverage this quarter. We've introduced and updated detection for over 80 key malware families with automated configuration extraction and added YARA rules for over 250 new malware families, dramatically improving the identification of existing and emerging threats. This update prioritizes malware families actively observed in Mandiant incident response engagements, SecOps customer environments, and top GTI search trends.

For example, recent Mandiant investigations led to enhanced detections for:

• CHAINVERB, a downloader that hides its download URL within a digital certificate that deploys a remote access tool on infected systems.
• ODORDAHLIA, a sophisticated backdoor used to target several industries including healthcare and construction & engineering.
• SWITCHBLADE, an evasive dropper that deploys popular backdoors and credential stealers.

We've also updated detections for prevalent threats like CobaltStrike's BEACON implant, NJRAT, and XWORM, ensuring continued effectiveness against these widely used tools. To learn how to leverage these detection capabilities for proactive threat hunting, be sure to read our recent blog post on threat hunting with malware configurations.

Live interaction with URLs in Private Scanning (sandbox detonation). Private Scanning allows its users to analyze URLs and files in a non-shareable fashion, including dynamic analysis in sandboxes and vetting with {YARA, Sigma, IDS} rules. We have extended this capability to allow for live interaction with URLs during sandbox detonation. This new feature builds upon the existing interactive malware analysis capabilities and enables analysts to directly interact with web pages within the sandbox environment. This allows for a more comprehensive analysis of dynamic web content, including navigating multi-step processes, solving captchas, submitting forms, and observing behavior triggered by user interaction, which may be missed by automated analysis. Similarly, it also allows analysts to visit potentially harmful content in a safe manner, without having to install local virtual machines or an analysis lab.

Support for .onion domains in Private URL scanning. Private URL scanning enables users to submit websites for analysis, identifying redirection chains, web trackers, downloaded files, and other dynamic properties. We have now extended this functionality to specifically include support for .onion domains within the live interaction URL scanning feature. This enhancement allows users to leverage the interactive sandbox environment to analyze websites hosted on the Tor network, providing visibility into potentially malicious content or infrastructure that is otherwise difficult to access and analyze. This support is exclusive to the interactive scanning mode, enhancing the depth of analysis for these often obfuscated resources.

Enhanced network environment control in Private Scanning. As previously described, Private Scanning empowers users to conduct in-depth analysis of files and URLs within isolated static + dynamic sandbox environments. Building upon this dynamic analysis capability, we are introducing advanced Internet connection options during file sandbox detonation. This new functionality provides granular control over the network connectivity of the sandbox, allowing analysts to simulate various network conditions and observe how threats react. The available options include:

• No Internet: completely isolates the sandbox from the internet.
• Direct connection to Internet: provides a standard internet connection for the sandbox.
• Interception of HTTPS/TLS connections: enables the capture and analysis of encrypted network traffic, e.g. to identify HTTPS URLs used for CnC purposes or to download additional malicious payloads.
• Internet routed through Tor network: allows analysis of malware behavior when communicating through the Tor anonymity network.
• OpenVPN custom configuration: supports the use of custom OpenVPN configurations to simulate specific network environments. Documentation on self hosted and 3rd party VPN connectivity.
• Traffic routing through {Germany, Japan, Singapore, US East, United Kingdom}: enables the routing of sandbox network traffic through geographically diverse exit nodes to circumvent cloaking/evasion techniques or to understand region-specific malware customizations.

This enhancement is accessible within the Private Scanning interactive malware analysis capabilities.

Netblocks support in YARA Livehunt. YARA is de-facto pattern matching tool for threat intel analysts and malware researchers. As previously described, Google Threat Intelligence extends YARA beyond file content matching to be able to match incoming URLs, domains and IPs. We are adding support for matching against netblocks within our "vt" YARA module. This new feature allows users to create YARA rules that can identify network traffic or indicators associated with specific IP address ranges or CIDR blocks. This enhancement can be valuable for threat hunting and identifying activity originating from or communicating with known malicious infrastructure or threat actor-associated netblocks. See examples:

import "vt"
rule ip_in_some_IPv4_range {
  condition:
    vt.net.ip.in_range("192.168.1.0/24")
}

import "vt"
rule ip_in_some_IPv6_range {
  condition:
    vt.net.ip.in_range("2001:db8::1/32")
}