Google Drive Gets Smarter: AI Now Hunts Down Ransomware Before It Wrecks Your Files
Google is rolling out a brand new AI-powered protection for Drive on desktop, designed to identify ransomware assaults earlier than they unfold like wildfire.
As The Verge experiences, the system makes use of fashions skilled on tens of millions of real-world ransomware samples, pausing suspicious sync exercise and giving customers the possibility to roll again to safer variations of their information.
This improve lands at a time when ransomware incidents are climbing. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence counted greater than 5,000 assaults worldwide in 2024 alone, a 15% leap from the earlier 12 months.
Attacks are hitting everybody—from hospitals to colleges to multinational firms—making resilience an even bigger precedence than ever.
Google’s transfer mirrors a broader trade push to bake AI into cybersecurity. Just final week, the European Central Bank tapped AI firm Feedzai to battle fraud in its upcoming digital euro, underscoring how central AI is changing into in defending each knowledge and cash.
And the strain isn’t solely on the tech corporations. Regulators are stepping in too.
In Brussels, conversations across the EU’s AI Act are intensifying, with policymakers calling for stricter safeguards on how AI is deployed in delicate domains like finance and safety.
Ransomware prevention matches squarely in that dialog—as a result of as soon as private or enterprise knowledge will get encrypted by criminals, it’s normally too late.
Personally, I discover this an interesting shift. For years, cloud storage felt like a vault—secure, dependable, boring even.
But the reality is, attackers go the place the info lives, and nowadays, that’s within the cloud.
Adding AI that not solely watches for recognized signatures however adapts to novel threats seems like the correct of paranoia.
The massive take a look at, although, will probably be whether or not on a regular basis customers really discover and belief it—or in the event that they’ll solely care after they dodge their first ransomware bullet.