Google Cloud revealed a new Virtual Machine Threat Detection feature that can warn customers when cryptocurrency-mining malware is running on their VMs. That could help the increasingly-common occurrence of cloud-based systems hijacked to run cryptomining workloads, like the hack that racked up $45,000 in charges for one unlucky AWS user.
“VM Threat Detection is a managed service that scans enabled Compute Engine projects and VM instances to detect unwanted applications running inside VMs,” Google said. “When you enable this service on a resource (an organization or project), scans are automatically configured and scheduled for that resource.”
