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Meet the team responsible for hacking Google

Creating safe and secure products for everyone is the top priority for Google’s security teams. We work across the globe to keep up with current threats, improve security controls, conduct attack detection/prevention, and eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities by driving new and better frameworks. Our teams also actively monitor adversaries, making sure we have all the intelligence to be prepared for malicious activity and targeted campaigns against our Googlers or the people who use our services daily.

Today, we would like to shine a spotlight on one security team at Google — the Red Team — that supports all of these efforts in a way that might initially seem counterintuitive: by hacking Google.

The term “Red Team” came from the military, and described activities where a designated team would play an adversarial role (the “Red Team”) against the “home” team, who would seek to adapt to the Red Team’s activities and counteract them. Over the years, these terms have found their way into the information security (InfoSec) space.

Google’s Red Team is a team of hackers that simulate a variety of adversaries, ranging from nation states and well-known Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups to hacktivists, individual criminals or even malicious insiders. Whatever actor is simulated, we will mimic their strategies, motives, goals, and even their tools of choice — placing ourselves inside the minds of hackers targeting Google.

The benefits of Red Team exercises

Running these simulations provides value in various ways. To start, it offers our teams tasked with detecting and responding to actual attackers a unique opportunity to identify improvements. And it allows us to determine if an attack could have been detected earlier or responded to faster. Along with security and subject matter experts on rotation, the collective industry experience and diverse backgrounds of the Red Team’s members allow us to identify blind spots that can turn into actionable improvements.

From 20% project to established team

The Red Team started in 2010 as a “20% project” — an internal initiative where Googlers are free to pursue projects we feel are worth investing time in outside of our day-to-day responsibilities. The team quickly proved its worth, and leadership recognized its positive impact on Google’s infrastructure and the value in applying a hacker mindset to problems in the security space. Since then, the Red Team has become an integral part of the security engineering function, running multiple exercises in parallel and collaborating across multiple continents.

Collaborative adversity

While Red Team exercises conducted at Google simulate an actor that is in most cases hostile and/or disruptive, there is a very clear distinction between the simulated threat and the engineers that play their role. While the threat actor seeks to reach their nefarious goals, Red Team engineers are Googlers that keep people’s safety in mind.

There is very close collaboration between the team simulating the attackers and the teams acting as defenders (e.g., Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Detection/Response teams), who might identify suspicious activities and respond to them. Since there are multiple exercises happening at any given time, we differentiate between several types of exercises and the response after detection. For most exercises, one of our primary goals is to test detection and make it as efficient as possible for defenders to verify that a signal is associated with an exercise. By doing this, we avoid using resources that could be used to thwart malicious activities targeting people using our services or our wider infrastructure. In other exercises, we want to make sure that the entire process of identifying, isolating and ejecting the attackers, works as intended and that we are able to improve processes.

Safety First

Given the sensitive nature of the work the Red Team does, safety protocols are key and all exercises are overseen by senior engineers. Making sure an exercise is conducted in a safe and responsible manner is as important as any other goal the team is trying to achieve. This may mean forgoing realistic simulation in favor of spending more time on making sure each action is documented, no sensitive data is accessed without proper oversight, and that laws and regulations are obeyed — which is traditionally not something that APT groups are overly concerned about. For the Red Team, accurately simulating the technical capabilities of highly advanced threat actors in a safe and responsible way is core to their mission.

For exercises focusing on detection, actions taken by the team are accessible at any time by the defenders to ensure that we can quickly rule out an external actor acting maliciously. Even if this does not become a necessity, the team will report their activities in detail to address any new findings discovered during the exercise.

Fostering change

In addition to testing and helping improve detection and response capabilities, we also actively research and identify new attack vectors based on adversarial research. It is critical to the Red Team’s mission to ensure that any newfound attack surface is shared with both the responsible product teams and the larger security team as soon as possible so that Google can adapt defensive controls and implement improvements to remediate the root cause.

Since its inception over a decade ago, the Red Team has adapted to a constantly evolving threat landscape and been a reliable sparring partner for defense teams across Google. Yet, new challenges await every day and the Red Team continually works to make the job – the job of hacking Google – harder. It’s a challenge we happily accept to keep people safe.

8 Agosto 2022
Copious Content: 5 Creative Ways B2B Marketers Can Benefit From Twitter’s New Long-Form Publishing
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Copious Content: 5 Creative Ways B2B Marketers Can Benefit From Twitter’s New Long-Form Publishing

Twitter's long-form content for B2B marketers woman image

Twitter's long-form content for B2B marketers woman image

How can B2B marketers rev up their social media engines using Twitter’s new long-form content publishing features?

Twitter Write is the social platform’s forthcoming tool for composing and sharing written content that runs well beyond Twitter’s traditional 280-character limit, initially offering up to 2,500 words — plenty of blank digital paper for B2B marketers and brands to fill with messages of innovation.

B2B marketers should be prepared when Twitter moves its Twitter Write feature from its present limited test-bed of hand-selected authors to a worldwide rollout, and we’ll show you how to be ready when the time comes.

Twitter has recently rearranged its Twitter Notes and newsletter features to exist under an expanded Twitter Write brand.

It’s also begun sharing additional information about Twitter Write, including at events such as the National Association of Black Journalists conference and its “#TwitterForNews: Going Beyond 280 Characters | Powered by Twitter” session.

The platform has shared several examples of how Twitter Write has been put to use by those with early access, including a look at how several journalists at the conference have published using the long-form Twitter feature.

Let’s take our own look at five creative ways B2B marketers can take advantage of Twitter’s forthcoming long-form content creation options.

1 — Stand Out With Unexpected Insight

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For eyes accustomed to seeing hundreds of tiny tweets scrolling by at a mile-a-minute, B2B marketers can stand out simply by being among the first to creatively use Twitter Write, and the content that it will publish — which the platform calls Twitter Notes.

Merely using Twitter Notes will be a curiosity at first, however B2B marketers should take full advantage of the situation by providing unexpected insight that is crafted specifically to work well within the 2,500-word limit of Twitter Write.

What might stand out the most to B2B marketers viewing a brand’s Twitter feed? How about these ideas, for starters:

  • Case Studies
  • Client & Customer Testimonials
  • Original Research, Reports, Studies & Surveys
  • Behind-The-Scenes Interviews

The one-two punch of seeing this type of B2B content in a radically-unexpected long format on Twitter would be quite likely to shake things up — and increase brand engagement in the process. In a B2B marketing landscape where being different and standing out is paramount, Twitter Write’s long-form content could be a powerful new publishing option.

[bctt tweet=”“In a B2B marketing landscape where being different and standing out is paramount, Twitter Write’s long-form content could be a powerful new publishing differentiator.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]

2 — Create Cliffhanger Episodic Content

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With the vastly increased written content capacity of Twitter Write comes new possibilities for not only stand-alone writing, but serialized content of all sorts.

B2B marketers could use Twitter Notes to take advantage of the power of episodic content, as our own senior content marketing manager Nick Nelson explored in “Hungry for More: What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Episodic Content,” and as our senior content marketing manager Joshua Nite took a look at in “Episodic Expansion: How to Optimize B2B Experiences by Expanding Your Podcast to Full-On Video,” with insights that apply in many cases just as much to the written word as video.

Sharing your latest cliffhanger digital content on Twitter Write — with a suspenseful call-to-action (CTA) to return for the rest of the story during the next episode — is a method B2B marketers will be able to experiment with using Twitter Notes. You can learn more about creating successful CTAs in “Winning B2B Calls to Action That Get Responses & Convert Browsers into Buyers.”

3 — Publish In-Depth Newsletters

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Just last year Twitter expanded its platform with an array of newsletter-related features with the acquisition of Revue, which it has now rolled into the Twitter Write mix as Revue by Twitter.

Twitter Write offers a different way to publish on the platform, and B2B marketers could even utilize both Twitter’s Revue and Notes options to tie similar content together  — potentially driving audiences who are engaging with their written content on their Twitter newsletter to additional relevant or bonus information shared within Notes content.

Writing a winning newsletter — whether it’s broadcast via email, through the newsletter features of LinkedIn* or Twitter, or in any of the many other ways they can be published online, is a topic well worth exploring, as we recently dug into with “Sign Me Up: How B2B Marketers Will Create Top-Notch Newsletters In 2022.”

4 — Harness Long-Form Content To Build A Twitter Community

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B2B brands that are looking to build a bigger and more engaged community on Twitter will have a powerful new tool at their disposal, as Twitter Write will let brands dig deeper and tell more engaging stories on the platform than has heretofore been possible using only 280 characters at a time.

It takes great storytelling to attract, engage, and convert in B2B marketing, and having a bigger slate to work with using Twitter Notes will let more powerful brand, customer, and employee stories gain a new audience.

You’ll find even more about the practice of successful B2B storytelling in our many articles on the topic, including “Free The Story: How B2B Marketers Can Use Digital Storytelling To Bring Content Alive In New Ways,” “Why There’s a Need for Creative Storytelling in B2B Tech and How Influencer Marketing Can Accelerate Results,” and “Microsoft’s Miri Rodriguez on How B2B Marketers Are Embracing Empathy For Better Customer Storytelling.”

5 — The Expanding Universe of Brand, Executive & Employee Influence

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It’s no secret anymore that the people who together form a company — from corporate executives to bright-eyed freshly-hired interns — hold an influential power unlike that any traditional marketing can easily provide. This is why the art and science of B2B influencer marketing has seen steadily climbing implementation among major global brands over the past decade, and especially during the past two years.

Executive influence has come through as a standout element leading to success in our own recently-published comprehensive 2022 B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, with 65 percent of B2B brands saying that internal executives have been effective at increasing the influence of the brand.

Additionally, as part of improving brand thought leadership, some 75 percent of B2B marketers already work with internal executives to grow their credibility with customers, and a full two-thirds of those who work with executives say their program has been very or extremely effective at increasing brand influence.

2022 August 5 Statistics Image

Captivate & Delight With Long-Form Twitter Content

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At its best, writing can captivate and delight no matter which digital platform it lives on, however when marketers fine-tune this type of best-answer content to precisely take advantage of a particular social platform, the resulting online experience will more often than not be accompanied by new levels of success and engagement.

The question of how B2B marketers can best craft the type of content that elevates the lives of the people who seek to learn from it is a deep one, which I explore further in “Content Contemplations: How We Process Information & Why B2B Marketers Must Craft Content That Elevates.”

Knowing what will work well when it comes to the new long-form content features of Twitter Write is bound to give B2B marketers an advantage when Twitter releases the capability to all of its users.

We hope that the five ideas for creative long-form content creation we’ve looked at here will be helpful in your own future efforts, whether on Twitter or in any other media format.

When it comes to crafting award-winning B2B video marketing that elevates, amplifies, and humanizes, there are no short-cuts, which is why an increasing number of firms are choosing to work with a top digital marketing agency such as TopRank Marketing. Contact us to learn how we can help, as we’ve done for over 20 years for businesses ranging from LinkedIn, Dell and 3M to Adobe, Oracle, monday.com and others.

*LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.

The post Copious Content: 5 Creative Ways B2B Marketers Can Benefit From Twitter’s New Long-Form Publishing appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

8 Agosto 2022