Web Risk Safety 101: Singapore’s Phishing Defense!

Singapore and Google’s Web Risk protects citizens from phishing and scams

The landscape of security, schemes, and fraudulent is fast transforming as a result of a growing amount of consumers using internet access and the ongoing establishment of additional goods online. Both municipal and business sectors are growing their financial commitments with the goal to further protect their staffs as well as the individuals who ultimately profit from their goods and services.

The Government Technology Agency of Singapore and Google Cloud have announced that they would be working together to deploy Google Cloud Web Risk to provide enhanced protection for citizens and residents of Singapore against phishing and other forms of online fraud. As part of the agreement, Google Cloud Web Risk will use its numerous application programming interfaces (APIs) to supply Singapore with threat information about harmful websites and phishing pages. This information will subsequently be used to prohibit access to websites and pages that have been recognized as being harmful in order to safeguard citizens and residents of Singapore with a red warning in the browser.

Users are able to determine whether or not a URL is in violation of any Safe Browsing regulations, assess how hazardous a URL is, and submit URLs to Google Cloud for screening by using the Web Risk tool. Google Safe Browsing is a database that is always being updated to include potentially harmful websites and information.

If a URL is found to break any of the Safe Browsing standards, it will be placed to the blocklist that safeguards more than 5 billion devices within minutes of the violation being discovered. Consumers are shielded towards destructive incidents that include phishing and malware by virtue of the availability of these distinctive assortment of capabilities.

“The collaboration with Google Cloud forms part of GovTech’s efforts for staying ahead of cyberattacks while maintaining an appropriate digital environment for Singaporeans,” The partnership using Google Cloud is part of GovTech’s work to sustain a safe cyber landscape for Singaporeans.

Our powers at the Government Online Security Operational Centre have been significantly enhanced by Web Risk, which allows us to scan more websites, identify new risks, and reduce the amount of time it takes for us to respond. “As we move forward with the construction of our Smart Nation, we will continue to beef up these defenses,” said Goh Wei Boon, the chief executive officer of GovTech.

Web Risk is going to be included into the ecosystem of cybersecurity that is managed by the Government Cyber Security Operations Centre (GCSOC) in Singapore. The Global Cyber Security Operations Center (GCSOC) employs its very own automated systems, such as PhishMonSG, to collect hundreds of potentially hazardous phishing websites every single day.

These websites come from commercial feeds and crowdsourcing efforts, such as ScamShield. Following the completion of the deduplication and normalization processes, they make use of the Google Web Risk Evaluate API to determine the amount of danger posed by a questionable website. Through Web Risk’s Submission API, banning requests are only made for websites that are regarded as potentially harmful.

The vice president of Security Products at Google Cloud, Jeff Reed, was quoted as saying, “The Singapore government has comprehensive strategies to systematically combat online scams.” Their ability to aggregate and combine crowdsourced data and commercial feeds into a single area for the sake of verification and disruption left us quite pleased.

We will be able to dramatically improve the safety of Singapore’s cyberspace as a result of their efforts, which, when coupled with Google’s extraordinary threat visibility across the billions of URLs that we investigate on a daily basis, as well as Web Risk’s unique skills in the industry, will enable us to do so.

Andre Ng, a cybersecurity expert and the technical lead for GovTech’s PhishMonSG, stated the following about Web Risk: “What Web Risk brings to the table is additional and automated means of disruption that helps us verify and block malicious URLs within minutes to a few hours, removing threats before they cause harm to Singaporeans.”