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Executive Summary

Cybercrime makes up a majority of the malicious activity online and occupies the majority of defenders’ resources. In 2024, Mandiant Consulting responded to almost four times more intrusions conducted by financially motivated actors than state-backed intrusions. Despite this overwhelming volume, cybercrime receives much less attention from national security practitioners than the threat from state-backed groups. While the threat from state-backed hacking is rightly understood to be severe, it should not be evaluated in isolation from financially motivated intrusions. 

A hospital disrupted by a state-backed group using a wiper and a hospital disrupted by a financially motivated group using ransomware have the same impact on patient care. Likewise, sensitive data stolen from an organization and posted on a data leak site can be exploited by an adversary in the same way data exfiltrated in an espionage operation can be. These examples are particularly salient today, as criminals increasingly target and leak data from hospitals. Healthcare’s share of posts on data leak sites has doubled over the past three years, even as the number of data leak sites tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group has increased by nearly 50% year over year. The impact of these attacks mean that they must be taken seriously as a national security threat, no matter the motivation of the actors behind it.

Cybercrime also facilitates state-backed hacking by allowing states to purchase cyber capabilities, or co-opt criminals to conduct state-directed operations to steal data or engage in disruption. Russia has drawn on criminal capabilities to fuel the cyber support to their war in Ukraine. GRU-linked APT44 (aka Sandworm), a unit of Russian military intelligence, has employed malware available from cybercrime communities to conduct espionage and disruptive operations in Ukraine and CIGAR (aka RomCom), a group that historically focused on cybercrime, has conducted espionage operations against the Ukrainian government since 2022. However, this is not limited to Russia. Iranian threat groups deploy ransomware to raise funds while simultaneously conducting espionage, and Chinese espionage groups often supplement their income with cybercrime. Most notably, North Korea uses state-backed groups to directly generate revenue for the regime. North Korea has heavily targeted cryptocurrencies, compromising exchanges and individual victims’ crypto wallets. 

Despite the overlaps in effects and collaboration with states, tackling the root causes of cybercrime requires fundamentally different solutions. Cybercrime involves collaboration between disparate groups often across borders and without respect to sovereignty. Any solution requires international cooperation by both law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track, arrest, and prosecute these criminals. Individual takedowns can have important temporary effects, but the collaborative nature of cybercrime means that the disrupted group will be quickly replaced by others offering the same service. Achieving broader success will require collaboration between countries and public and private sectors on systemic solutions such as increasing education and resilience efforts.

Stand-Alone Cybercrime is a Threat to Countries’ National Security

Financially motivated cyber intrusions, even those without any ties to state goals, harm national security. A single incident can be impactful enough on its own to have a severe consequence on the victim and disrupt citizens’ access to critical goods and services. The enormous volume of financially motivated intrusions occurring every day also has a cumulative impact, hurting national economic competitiveness and placing huge strain on cyber defenders, leading to decreased readiness and burnout.

A Single Financially-Motivated Operation Can Have Severe Effects

Cybercrime, particularly ransomware attacks, are a serious threat to critical infrastructure. Disruptions to energy infrastructure, such as the 2021 Colonial Pipeline attack, a 2022 incident at the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp refining hub, and the 2023 attack on Petro-Canada, have disrupted citizens’ ability to access vital goods. While the impacts in these cases were temporary and recoverable, a ransomware attack during a weather emergency or other acute situation could have devastating consequences.

Beyond energy, the ransomware attacks on the healthcare sector have had the most severe consequences on everyday people. At the height of the pandemic in early 2020, it appeared that ransomware groups might steer clear of hospitals, with multiple groups making statements to that effect, but the forbearance did not hold. Healthcare organizations’ critical missions and the high impact of disruptions have led them to be perceived as more likely to pay a ransom and led some groups to increase their focus on targeting healthcare. The healthcare industry, especially hospitals, almost certainly continues to be a lucrative target for ransomware operators given the sensitivity of patient data and the criticality of the services that it provides.

Since 2022, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed a notable increase in the number of data leak site (DLS) victims from within the hospital subsector. Data leak sites, which are used to release victim data following data theft extortion incidents, are intended to pressure victims to pay a ransom demand or give threat actors additional leverage during ransom negotiations. 

• In July 2024, the Qilin (aka “AGENDA”) DLS announced upcoming attacks targeting US healthcare organizations. They followed through with this threat by adding a regional medical center to their list of claimed victims on the DLS the following week, and adding multiple healthcare and dental clinics in August 2024. The ransomware operators have purportedly stated that they focus their targeting on sectors that pay well, and one of those sectors is healthcare.

• In March 2024, the RAMP forum actor “badbone,” who has been associated with INC ransomware, sought illicit access to Dutch and French medical, government, and educational organizations, stating that they were willing to pay 2–5% more for hospitals, particularly ones with emergency services.

Studies from academics and internal hospital reviews have shown that the disruptions from ransomware attacks go beyond inconvenience and have led to life-threatening consequences for patients. Disruptions can impact not just individual hospitals but also the broader healthcare supply chain. Cyberattacks on companies that manufacture critical medications and life-saving therapies can have far-reaching consequences worldwide. 

• A recent study from researchers at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities School of Public Health showed that among patients already admitted to a hospital when a ransomware attack takes place, “in-hospital mortality increases by 35 – 41%.”

• Public reporting stated that UK National Health Service data showed a June 2024 ransomware incident at a contractor led to multiple cases of “long-term or permanent impact on physical, mental or social function or shortening of life-expectancy,” with more numerous cases of less severe effects.

Ransomware operators are aware that their attacks on hospitals will have severe consequences and will likely increase government attention on them. Although some have devised strategies to mitigate the blowback from these operations, the potential monetary rewards associated with targeting hospitals continue to drive attacks on the healthcare sector.

• The actor “FireWalker,” who has recruited partners for REDBIKE (aka Akira) ransomware operations, indicated a willingness to accept access to government and medical targets, but in those cases a different ransomware called “FOULFOG” would be used.

• Leaked private communications broadly referred to as the “ContiLeaks” reveal that the actors expected their plan to target the US healthcare system in the fall of 2020 to cause alarm, with one actor stating “there will be panic.”

Economic Disruption

On May 8, 2022, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a national emergency caused by CONTI ransomware attacks against several Costa Rican government agencies the month prior. These intrusions caused widespread disruptions in government medical, tax, pension, and customs systems. With imports and exports halted, ports were overwhelmed, and the country reportedly experienced millions of dollars of losses. The remediation costs extended beyond Costa Rica; Spain supported the immediate response efforts, and in 2023, the US announced $25 million USD in cybersecurity aid to Costa Rica. 

While the Costa Rica incident was exceptional, responding to a cybercrime incident can involve significant expenses for the affected entity, such as paying multi-million dollar ransom demands, loss of income due to system downtime, providing credit monitoring services to impacted clients, and paying remediation costs and fines. In just one example, a US healthcare organization reported $872 million USD in “unfavorable cyberattack effects” after a disruptive incident. In the most extreme cases, these costs can contribute to organizations ceasing operations or declaring bankruptcy. 

In addition to the direct impacts to individual organizations, financial impacts often extend to taxpayers and can have significant impacts on the national economy due to follow-on effects of the disruptions. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has indicated that between October 2013 and December 2023, business email compromise (BEC) operations alone led to $55 billion USD in losses. The cumulative effect of these cybercrime incidents can have an impact on a country’s economic competitiveness. This can be particularly severe for smaller or developing countries, especially those with a less diverse economy.

Data Leak Sites Add Additional Threats

In addition to deploying ransomware to interfere with business operations, criminal groups have added the threat of leaking data stolen from victims to bolster their extortion operations. This now standard tactic has increased the volume of sensitive data being posted by criminals and created an opportunity for it to be obtained and exploited by state intelligence agencies. 

Threat actors post proprietary company data—including research and product designs—on data leak sites where they are accessible to the victims’ competitors. GTIG has previously observed threat actors sharing tips for targeting valuable data for extortion operations. In our research, GTIG identified Conti “case instructions” indicating that actors should prioritize certain types of data to use as leverage in negotiations, including files containing confidential information, document scans, HR documents, company projects, and information protected by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The number of data leak sites has proliferated, with the number of sites tracked by GTIG almost doubling since 2022. Leaks of confidential business and personal information by extortion groups can cause embarrassment and legal consequences for the affected organization, but they also pose national security threats. If a company’s confidential intellectual property is leaked, it can undermine the firm’s competitive position in the market and undermine the host country’s economic competitiveness. The wide-scale leaking of personally identifiable information (PII) also creates an opportunity for foreign governments to collect this information to facilitate surveillance and tracking of a country’s citizens.

Cybercrime Directly Supporting State Activity

Since the earliest computer network intrusions, financially motivated actors have conducted operations for the benefit of hostile governments. While this pattern has been consistent, the heightened level of cyber activity following Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown that, in times of heightened need, the latent talent pool of cybercriminals can be paid or coerced to support state goals. Operations carried out in support of the state, but by criminal actors, have numerous benefits for their sponsors, including a lower cost and increased deniability. As the volume of financially motivated activity increases, the potential danger it presents does as well.

States as a Customer in Cybercrime Ecosystems

Modern cybercriminals are likely to specialize in a particular area of cybercrime and partner with other entities with diverse specializations to conduct operations. The specialization of cybercrime capabilities presents an opportunity for state-backed groups to simply show up as another customer for a group that normally sells to other criminals. Purchasing malware, credentials, or other key resources from illicit forums can be cheaper for state-backed groups than developing them in-house, while also providing some ability to blend in to financially motivated operations and attract less notice.

Russian State Increasingly Leveraging Malware, Tooling Sourced from Crime Marketplaces

Google assesses that resource constraints and operational demands have contributed to Russian cyber espionage groups’ increasing use of free or publicly available malware and tooling, including those commonly employed by criminal actors to conduct their operations. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, GTIG has observed groups suspected to be affiliated with Russian military intelligence services adopt this type of “low-equity” approach to managing their arsenal of malware, utilities, and infrastructure. The tools procured from financially motivated actors are more widespread and lower cost than those developed by the government. This means that if an operation using this malware is discovered, the cost of developing a new tool will not be borne by the intelligence agency; additionally, the use of such tools may assist in complicating attribution efforts. Notably, multiple threat clusters with links to Russian military intelligence have leveraged disruptive malware adapted from existing ransomware variants to target Ukrainian entities. 

APT44 (Sandworm, FROZENBARENTS)

APT44, a threat group sponsored by Russian military intelligence, almost certainly relies on a diverse set of Russian companies and criminal marketplaces to source and sustain its more frequently operated offensive capabilities. The group has used criminally sourced tools and infrastructure as a source of disposable capabilities that can be operationalized on short notice without immediate links to its past operations. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, APT44 has increased its use of such tooling, including malware such as DARKCRYSTALRAT (DCRAT), WARZONE, and RADTHIEF (“Rhadamanthys Stealer”), and bulletproof hosting infrastructure such as that provided by the Russian-speaking actor “yalishanda,” who advertises in cybercriminal underground communities.

• APT44 campaigns in 2022 and 2023 deployed RADTHIEF against victims in Ukraine and Poland. In one campaign, spear-phishing emails targeted a Ukrainian drone manufacturer and leveraged SMOKELOADER, a publicly available downloader popularized in a Russian-language underground forum that is still frequently used in criminal operations, to load RADTHIEF. 

• APT44 also has a history of deploying disruptive malware built upon known ransomware variants. In October 2022, a cluster we assessed with moderate confidence to be APT44 deployed PRESSTEA (aka Prestige) ransomware against logistics entities in Poland and Ukraine, a rare instance in which APT44 deployed disruptive capabilities against a NATO country. In June 2017, the group conducted an attack leveraging ETERNALPETYA (aka NotPetya), a wiper disguised as ransomware, timed to coincide with Ukraine’s Constitution Day marking its independence from Russia. Nearly two years earlier, in late 2015, the group used a modified BLACKENERGY variant to disrupt the Ukrainian power grid. BLACKENERGY originally emerged as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tool, with later versions sold in criminal marketplaces.

UNC2589 (FROZENVISTA)

UNC2589, a threat cluster whose activity has been publicly attributed to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)’s 161st Specialist Training Center (Unit 29155), has conducted full-spectrum cyber operations, including destructive attacks, against Ukraine. The actor is known to rely on non-military elements including cybercriminals and private-sector organizations to enable their operations, and GTIG has observed the use of a variety of malware-as-a-service tools that are prominently sold in Russian-speaking cybercrime communities.

In January 2022, a month prior to the invasion, UNC2589 deployed PAYWIPE (also known as WHISPERGATE) and SHADYLOOK wipers against Ukrainian government entities in what may have been a preliminary strike, using the GOOSECHASE downloader and FINETIDE dropper to drop and execute SHADYLOOK on the target machine. US Department of Justice indictments identified a Russian civilian, who GTIG assesses was a likely criminal contractor, as managing the digital environments used to stage the payloads used in the attacks. Additionally, CERT-UA corroborated GTIG’s findings of strong similarities between SHADYLOOK and WhiteBlackCrypt ransomware (also tracked as WARYLOOK). GOOSECHASE and FINETIDE are also publicly available for purchase on underground forums.

Turla (SUMMIT)

In September 2022, GTIG identified an operation leveraging a legacy ANDROMEDA infection to gain initial access to selective targets conducted by Turla, a cyber espionage group we assess to be sponsored by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Turla re-registered expired command-and-control (C&C or C2) domains previously used by ANDROMEDA, a common commodity malware that was widespread in the early 2010s, to profile victims; it then selectively deployed KOPILUWAK and QUIETCANARY to targets in Ukraine. The ANDROMEDA backdoor whose C2 was hijacked by Turla was first uploaded to VirusTotal in 2013 and spreads from infected USB keys. 

While GTIG has continued to observe ANDROMEDA infections across a wide variety of victims, GTIG has only observed suspected Turla payloads delivered in Ukraine. However, Turla’s tactic of piggybacking on widely distributed, financially motivated malware to enable follow-on compromises is one that can be used against a wide range of organizations. Additionally, the use of older malware and infrastructure may cause such a threat to be overlooked by defenders triaging a wide variety of alerts.

In December 2024, Microsoft reported on the use of Amadey bot malware related to cyber criminal activity to target Ukrainian military entities by Secret Blizzard, an actor that aligns approximately with what we track as Turla. While we are unable to confirm this activity, Microsoft’s findings suggest that Turla has continued to leverage the tactic of using cybercrime malware.

APT29 (ICECAP)

In late 2021, GTIG reported on a campaign conducted by APT29, a threat group assessed to be sponsored by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), in which operators used credentials likely procured from an infostealer malware campaign conducted by a third-party actor to gain initial access to European entities. Infostealers are a broad classification of malware that have the capability or primary goal of collecting and stealing a range of sensitive user information such as credentials, browser data and cookies, email data, and cryptocurrency wallets.An analysis of workstations belonging to the target revealed that some systems had been infected with the CRYPTBOT infostealer shortly before a stolen session token used to gain access to the targets’ Microsoft 365 environment was generated.

Use of Cybercrime Tools by Iran and China 

While Russia is the country that has most frequently been identified drawing on resources from criminal forums, they are not the only ones. For instance, in May 2024, GTIG identified a suspected Iranian group, UNC5203, using the aforementioned RADTHIEF backdoor in an operation using themes associated with the Israeli nuclear research industry.

In multiple investigations, the Chinese espionage operator UNC2286 was observed ostensibly carrying out extortion operations, including using STEAMTRAIN ransomware, possibly to mask its activities. The ransomware dropped a JPG file named “Read Me.jpg” that largely copies the ransomware note delivered with DARKSIDE. However, no links have been established with the DARKSIDE ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), suggesting the similarities are largely superficial and intended to lend credibility to the extortion attempt. Deliberately mixing ransomware activities with espionage intrusions supports the Chinese Government’s public efforts to confound attribution by conflating cyber espionage activity and ransomware operations.

Criminals Supporting State Goals

In addition to purchasing tools for state-backed intrusion groups to use, countries can directly hire or co-opt financially motivated attackers to conduct espionage and attack missions on behalf of the state. Russia, in particular, has leveraged cybercriminals for state operations.

Current and Former Russian Cybercriminal Actors Engage in Targeted Activity Supporting State Objectives

Russian intelligence services have increasingly leveraged pre-existing or new relationships with cybercriminal groups to advance national objectives and augment intelligence collection. They have done so in particular since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. GTIG judges that this is a combination of new efforts by the Russian state and the continuation of ongoing efforts for other financially motivated, Russia-based threat actors that had relationships with the Russian intelligence services that predated the invasion. In at least some cases, current and former members of Russian cybercriminal groups have carried out intrusion activity likely in support of state objectives. 

CIGAR (UNC4895, RomCom)

CIGAR (also tracked as UNC4895 and publicly reported as RomCom) is a dual financial and espionage-motivated threat group. Active since at least 2019, the group historically conducted financially motivated operations before expanding into espionage activity that GTIG judges fulfills espionage requirements in support of Russian national interests following the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. CIGAR’s ongoing engagement in both types of activity differentiates the group from threat actors like APT44 or UNC2589, which leverage cybercrime actors and tooling toward state objectives. While the precise nature of the relationship between CIGAR and the Russian state is unclear, the group’s high operational tempo, constant evolution of its malware arsenal and delivery methods, and its access to and exploitation of multiple zero-day vulnerabilities suggest a level of sophistication and resourcefulness unusual for a typical cybercrime actor. 

Targeted intrusion activity from CIGAR dates back to late 2022, targeting Ukrainian military and government entities. In October 2022, CERT-UA reported on a phishing campaign that distributed emails allegedly on behalf of the Press Service of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which led to the deployment of the group’s signature RomCom malware. Two months later, in December 2022, CERT-UA highlighted a RomCom operation targeting users of DELTA, a situational awareness and battlefield management system used by the Ukrainian military.

CIGAR activity in 2023 and 2024 included the leveraging of zero-day vulnerabilities to conduct intrusion activity. In late June 2023, a phishing operation targeting European government and military entities used lures related to the Ukrainian World Congress, a nonprofit involved in advocacy for Ukrainian interests, and a then-upcoming NATO summit, to deploy the MAGICSPELL downloader, which exploited CVE-2023-36884 as a zero-day in Microsoft Word. In 2024, the group was reported to exploit the Firefox vulnerability CVE-2024-9680, chained together with the Windows vulnerability CVE-2024-49039, to deploy RomCom. 

CONTI

At the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the CONTI ransomware group publicly announced its support for the Russian government, and subsequent leaks of server logs allegedly containing chat messages from members of the group revealed that at least some individuals were interested in conducting targeted attacks,and may have been taking targeting directions from a third party. GTIG further assessed that former CONTI members comprise part of an initial access broker group conducting targeted attacks against Ukraine tracked by CERT-UA as UAC-0098. 

UAC-0098 historically delivered the IcedID banking trojan, leading to human-operated ransomware attacks, and GTIG assesses that the group previously acted as an initial access broker for various ransomware groups including CONTI and Quantum. In early 2022, however, the actor shifted its focus to Ukrainian entities in the government and hospitality sectors as well as European humanitarian and nonprofit organizations. 

Chinese-Language Operator Supports Espionage Goals 

UNC5174 (“Uteus”)

UNC5174 uses the “Uteus” hacktivist persona who has claimed to be affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, working as an access broker and possible contractor who conducts for-profit intrusions. UNC5174 has weaponized multiple vulnerabilities soon after they were publicly announced, attempting to compromise numerous devices before they could be patched. For example, in February 2024, UNC5174 was observed exploiting CVE-2024-1709 in ConnectWise ScreenConnect to compromise hundreds of institutions primarily in the US and Canada, and in April 2024, GTIG confirmed UNC5174 had weaponized CVE-2024-3400 in an attempt to exploit Palo Alto Network’s (PAN’s) GlobalProtect appliances. In both cases, multiple China-nexus clusters were identified leveraging the exploits, underscoring how UNC5174 may enable additional operators.

Hybrid Groups Enable Cheap Capabilities

Another form of financially motivated activity supporting state goals are groups whose main mission may be state-sponsored espionage are, either tacitly or explicitly, allowed to conduct financially motivated operations to supplement their income. This can allow a government to offset direct costs that would be required to maintain groups with robust capabilities. 

Moonlighting Among Chinese Contractors 

APT41

APT41 is a prolific cyber operator working out of the People’s Republic of China and most likely a contractor for the Ministry of State Security. In addition to state-sponsored espionage campaigns against a wide array of industries, APT41 has a long history of conducting financially motivated operations. The group’s cybercrime activity has mostly focused on the video game sector, including ransomware deployment. APT 41 has also enabled other Chinese espionage groups, with digital certificates stolen by APT41 later employed by other Chinese groups. APT41’s cybercrime has continued since GTIG’s 2019 report, with the United States Secret Service attributing an operation that stole millions in COVID relief funds to APT41, and GTIG identifying an operation targeting state and local governments.

Iranian Groups Deploy Ransomware for Disruption and Profit

Over the past several years, GTIG has observed Iranian espionage groups conducting ransomware operations and disruptive hack-and-leak operations. Although much of this activity is likely primarily driven by disruptive intent, some actors working on behalf of the Iranian government may also be seeking ways to monetize stolen data for personal gain, and Iran’s declining economic climate may serve as an impetus for this activity.

UNC757 

In August 2024, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Department of Defense Cybercrime Center (DC3) released a joint advisory indicating that a group of Iran-based cyber actors known as UNC757 collaborated with ransomware affiliates including NoEscape, Ransomhouse, and ALPHV to gain network access to organizations across various sectors and then help the affiliates deploy ransomware for a percentage of the profits. The advisory further indicated that the group stole data from targeted networks likely in support of the Iranian government, and their ransomware operations were likely not sanctioned by the Government of Iran. 

GTIG is unable to independently corroborate UNC757’s reported collaboration with ransomware affiliates. However, the group has historical, suspected ties to the persona “nanash” that posted an advertisement in mid-2020 on a cybercrime forum claiming to have access to various networks, as well as hack-and-leak operations associated with the PAY2KEY ransomware and corresponding persona that targeted Israeli firms. 

Examples of Dual Motive (Financial Gain and Espionage)

In multiple incidents, individuals who have conducted cyber intrusions on behalf of the Iranian government have also been identified conducting financially motivated intrusion. 

• A 2020 US Department of Justice indictment indicated that two Iranian nationals conducted cyber intrusion operations targeting data “pertaining to national security, foreign policy intelligence, non-military nuclear information, aerospace data, human rights activist information, victim financial information and personally identifiable information, and intellectual property, including unpublished scientific research.” The intrusions in some cases were conducted at the behest of the Iranian government, while in other instances, the defendants sold hacked data for financial gain. 

• In 2017, the US DoJ indicted an Iranian national who attempted to extort HBO by threatening to release stolen content. The individual had previously worked on behalf of the Iranian military to conduct cyber operations targeting military and nuclear software systems and Israeli infrastructure. 

DPRK Cyber Threat Actors Conduct Financially Motivated Operations to Generate Revenue for Regime, Fund Espionage Campaigns

Financially motivated operations are broadly prevalent among threat actors linked to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). These include groups focused on generating revenue for the regime as well as those that use the illicit funds to support their intelligence-gathering efforts. Cybercrime focuses on the cryptocurrency sector and blockchain-related platforms, leveraging tactics including but not limited to the creation and deployment of malicious applications posing as cryptocurrency trading platforms and the airdropping of malicious non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that redirect the user to wallet-stealing phishing websites. A March 2024 United Nations (UN) report estimated North Korean cryptocurrency theft between 2017 and 2023 at approximately $3 billion. 

APT38

APT38, a financially motivated group aligned with the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), was responsible for the attempted theft of vast sums of money from institutions worldwide, including via compromises targeting SWIFT systems. Public reporting has associated the group with the use of money mules and casinos to withdraw and launder funds from fraudulent ATM and SWIFT transactions. In publicly reported heists alone, APT38’s attempted thefts from financial institutions totaled over $1.1 billion USD, and by conservative estimates, successful operations have amounted to over $100 million USD. The group has also deployed destructive malware against target networks to render them inoperable following theft operations. While APT38 now appears to be defunct, we have observed evidence of its operators regrouping into other clusters, including those heavily targeting cryptocurrency and blockchain-related entities and other financials. 

UNC1069 (CryptoCore), UNC4899 (TraderTraitor)

Limited indicators suggest that threat clusters GTIG tracks as UNC1069 (publicly referred to as CryptoCore) and UNC4899 (also reported as TraderTraitor) are successors to the now-defunct APT38. These clusters focus on financial gain, primarily by targeting cryptocurrency and blockchain entities. In December 2024, a joint statement released by the US FBI, DC3, and National Police Agency of Japan (NPA) reported on TraderTraitor’s theft of cryptocurrency then valued at $308 million USD from a Japan-based company.

APT43 (Kimsuky)

APT43, a prolific cyber actor whose collection requirements align with the mission of the RGB, funds itself through cybercrime operations to support its primary mission of collecting strategic intelligence, in contrast to groups focused primarily on revenue generation like APT38. While the group’s espionage targeting is broad, it has demonstrated a particular interest in foreign policy and nuclear security, leveraging moderately sophisticated technical capabilities coupled with aggressive social engineering tactics against government organizations, academia, and think tanks. Meanwhile, APT43’s financially motivated operations focus on stealing and laundering cryptocurrency to buy operational infrastructure. 

UNC3782

UNC3782, a suspected North Korean threat actor active since at least 2022, conducts both financial crime operations against the cryptocurrency sector and espionage activity, including the targeting of South Korean organizations attempting to combat cryptocurrency-related crimes, such as law firms and related government and media entities. UNC3782 has targeted users on cryptocurrency platforms including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain, Cronos, Polygon, TRON, and Solana; Solana in particular constitutes a target-rich environment for criminal actors due to the platform’s rapid growth. 

APT45 (Andariel)

APT45, a North Korean cyber operator active since at least 2009, has conducted espionage operations focusing on government, defense, nuclear, and healthcare and pharmaceutical entities. The group has also expanded its remit to financially motivated operations, and we suspect that it engaged in the development of ransomware, distinguishing it from other DPRK-nexus actors. 

DPRK IT Workers 

DPRK IT workers pose as non-North Korean nationals seeking employment at a wide range of organizations globally to generate revenue for the North Korean regime, enabling it to evade sanctions and fund its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missiles programs. IT workers have also increasingly leveraged their privileged access at employer organizations to engage in or enable malicious intrusion activity and, in some cases, extort those organizations with threats of data leaks or sales of proprietary company information following the termination of their employment.,

While DPRK IT worker operations are widely reported to target US companies, they have increasingly expanded to Europe and other parts of the world. Tactics to evade detection include the use of front companies and services of “facilitators,” non-North Korean individuals who provide services such as money and/or cryptocurrency laundering, assistance during the hiring process, and receiving and hosting company laptops to enable the workers remote access in exchange for a percentage of the workers’ incomes.

A Comprehensive Approach is Required

We believe tackling this challenge will require a new and stronger approach recognizing the cybercriminal threat as a national security priority requiring international cooperation. While some welcome enhancements have been made in recent years, more must—and can—be done. The structure of the cybercrime ecosystem makes it particularly resilient to takedowns. Financially motivated actors tend to specialize in a single facet of cybercrime and regularly work with others to accomplish bigger schemes. While some actors may repeatedly team up with particular partners, actors regularly have multiple suppliers (or customers) for a given service. 

If a single ransomware-as-a-service provider is taken down, many others are already in place to fill in the gap that has been created. This resilient ecosystem means that while individual takedowns can disrupt particular operations and create temporary inconveniences for cybercriminals, these methods need to be paired with wide-ranging efforts to improve defense and crack down on these criminals’ ability to carry out their operations. We urge policymakers to consider taking a number of steps:

• Demonstrably elevate cybercrime as a national security priority: Governments must recognize cybercrime as a pernicious national security threat and allocate resources accordingly. This includes prioritizing intelligence collection and analysis on cybercriminal organizations, enhancing law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute cybercrime, and fostering international cooperation to dismantle these transnational networks.
• Strengthen cybersecurity defenses: Policymakers should promote the adoption of robust cybersecurity measures across all sectors, particularly critical infrastructure. This includes incentivizing the implementation of security best practices, investing in research and development of advanced security technologies, enabling digital modernization and uptake of new technologies that can advantage defenders, and supporting initiatives that enhance the resilience of digital systems against attacks and related deceptive practices.
• Disrupt the cybercrime ecosystem: Targeted efforts are needed to disrupt the cybercrime ecosystem by targeting key enablers such as malware developers, bulletproof hosting providers, and financial intermediaries such as cryptocurrency exchanges. This requires a combination of legal, technical, and financial measures to dismantle the infrastructure that supports cybercriminal operations and coordinated international efforts to enable the same.
• Enhance international cooperation: cybercrime transcends national borders, necessitating strong international collaboration to effectively combat this threat. Policymakers should prioritize and resource international frameworks for cyber threat information sharing, joint investigations, and coordinated takedowns of cybercriminal networks, including by actively contributing to the strengthening of international organizations and initiatives dedicated to combating cybercrime, such as the Global Anti-Scams Alliance (GASA). They should also prioritize collective efforts to publicly decry malicious cyber activity through joint public attribution and coordinated sanctions, where appropriate. 
• Empower individuals and businesses: Raising awareness about cyber threats and promoting cybersecurity education is crucial to building a resilient society. Policymakers should support initiatives that educate individuals and businesses about online safety, encourage the adoption of secure practices, empower service providers to take action against cybercriminals including through enabling legislation, and provide resources for reporting and recovering from cyberattacks.
• Elevate strong private sector security practices: Ransomware and other forms of cybercrime predominantly exploit insecure, often legacy technology architectures. Policymakers should consider steps to prioritize technology transformation, including the adoption of technologies/products with a strong security track record; diversifying vendors to mitigate risk resulting from overreliance on a single technology; and requiring interoperability across the technology stack.

About the Authors

Google Threat Intelligence Group brings together the Mandiant Intelligence and Threat Analysis Group (TAG) teams, and focuses on identifying, analyzing, mitigating, and eliminating entire classes of cyber threats against Alphabet, our users, and our customers. Our work includes countering threats from government-backed attackers, targeted 0-day exploits, coordinated information operations (IO), and serious cybercrime networks. We apply our intelligence to improve Google’s defenses and protect our users and customers.

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Google has been at the forefront of data center infrastructure design for several decades, with a long list of innovations to our name. In this blog post, we highlight one of the key innovations that allowed us to manage unprecedented power and thermal fluctuations in our ML infrastructure. This innovation underscores the power of full codesign across the stack — from ASIC chip to data center, across both hardware and software. We also discuss the implications of this approach and propose a call to action for the broader industry. 

New ML workloads lead to new ML power challenges

Today’s ML workloads require synchronized computation across tens of thousands of accelerator chips, together with their hosts, storage, and networking systems; these workloads often occupy one entire data-center cluster — or even multiples of them. The peak power utilization of these workloads could approach the rated power of all the underlying IT equipment, making power overscription much more difficult. Furthermore, power consumption rises and falls between idle and peak utilization levels much more steeply, due to the fact that the entire cluster’s power usage is now dominated by no more than a few large ML workloads. You can observe these power fluctuations when a workload launches or finishes, or when it is halted, then resumed or rescheduled. You may also observe a similar pattern when the workload is running normally, mostly attributable to alternating compute- and networking-intensive phases of the workload within a training step. Depending on the workload’s characteristics, these inter- and intra-job power fluctuations can occur very frequently. This can result in multiple unintended consequences on the functionality, performance, and reliability of the data center infrastructure.

In fact, in our latest batch-synchronous ML workloads running on dedicated ML clusters, we observed power fluctuations in the tens of megawatts (MW), as shown in Fig.1. And compared to a traditional load variation profile, the ramp speed could be almost instantaneous, repeat as frequently as every few seconds, and last for weeks… or even months! 

Fluctuations of this kind pose the following risks:

• Functionality and long-term reliability issues with rack and data center equipment, resulting in hardware-induced outages, reduced energy efficiency and increased operational/maintenance costs, including but not limited to rectifiers, transformers, generators, cables and busways

• Damage, outage, or throttling at the upstream utility, including violation of contractual commitments to the utility on power usage profiles, and corresponding financial costs

• Unintended and frequent triggering of the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) system from large power fluctuations, resulting in shortened lifetime of the UPS system

Large power fluctuations may also impact hardware reliability at a much smaller per-chip or per-system scale. Although the maximum temperature is well under control, power fluctuations may still translate into large and frequent temperature fluctuations, triggering various forms of interactions including warpage, changes to thermal interface material property, and electromigration.

A full-stack approach to proactive power shaping

Due to the high complexity and large scale of our data-center infrastructure, we posited that proactively shaping a workload’s power profile could be more efficient than simply adapting to it. Google’s full codesign across the stack — from chip to data center, from hardware to software, and from instruction set to realistic workload — provides us with all the knobs we need to implement highly efficient end-to-end power management features to regulate our workloads’ power profiles and mitigate detrimental fluctuations. 

Specifically, we installed instrumentation in the TPU compiler to check on signatures in the workload that are linked with power fluctuations, such as sync flags. We then dynamically balance the activities of major compute blocks of the TPU around these flags to smooth out their utilization over time. This achieves our goal of mitigating power and thermal fluctuations with negligible performance overhead. In the future, we may also apply a similar approach to the workload’s starting and completion phases, resulting in a gradual, rather than abrupt, change in power levels. 

We’ve now implemented this compiler-based approach to shaping the power profile and applied it on realistic workloads. We measured the system’s total power consumption and a single chip’s hotspot temperature with, and without, the mitigation, as plotted in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3, respectively. In the test case, the magnitude of power fluctuations dropped by nearly 50% from the baseline case to the mitigation case. The magnitude of temperature fluctuations also dropped from ~20 C in the baseline case to ~10 C in the mitigation case. We measured the cost of the mitigation by the increase in average power consumption and the length of the training step. With proper tuning of the mitigation parameters, we can achieve the benefits of our design with small increases in average power with <1% performance impact.

A call to action 

ML infrastructure is growing rapidly and expected to surpass traditional server infrastructure in terms of total power demand in the coming years. At the same time, ML infrastructure’s power and temperature fluctuations are unique and tightly coupled with the ML workload’s characteristics. Mitigating these fluctuations is just one example of many innovations we need to ensure reliable and high-performance infrastructure. In addition to the method described above, we’ve been investing in an array of innovative techniques to take on ever-increasing power and thermal challenges, including data center water cooling, vertical power delivery, power-aware workload allocation, and many more. 

But these challenges aren’t unique to Google. Power and temperature fluctuations in ML infrastructure are becoming a common issue for many hyperscalers and cloud providers as well as infrastructure providers. We need partners at all levels of the system to help: 

• Utility providers to set forth a standardized definition of acceptable power quality metrics — especially in scenarios where multiple data centers with large power fluctuations co-exist within a same grid and interact with one another

• Power and cooling equipment suppliers to offer quality and reliability enhancements for electronics components, particularly for use-conditions with large and frequent power and thermal fluctuations

• Hardware suppliers and data center designers to create a standardized suite of solutions such as rack-level capacitor banks (RLCB) or on-chip features, to help establish an efficient supplier base and ecosystem

• ML model developers to consider the energy consumption characteristics of the model, and consider adding low-level software mitigations to help address energy fluctuations

Google has been leading and advocating for industry-wide collaboration on these issues through forums such as Open Compute Project (OCP) to benefit the data center infrastructure industry as a whole. We look forward to continuing to share our learnings and collaborating on innovative new solutions together.

^{A special thanks to Denis Vnukov, Victor Cai, Jianqiao Liu, Ibrahim Ahmed, Venkata Chivukula, Jianing Fan, Gaurav Gandhi, Vivek Sharma, Keith Kleiner, Mudasir Ahmad, Binz Roy, Krishnanjan Gubba Ravikumar, Ashish Upreti and Chee Chung from Google Cloud for their contributions.}

At Google Cloud, we strive to make it easy to deploy AI models onto our infrastructure. In this blog we explore how the Cross-Cloud Network solution supports your AI workloads.

Managed and Unmanaged AI options

Google Cloud provides both managed (Vertex AI) and do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches for running AI workloads. 

• Vertex AI: A fully managed machine learning platform. Vertex AI offers both pre-trained Google models and access to third-party models through Model Garden. As a managed service, Vertex AI handles infrastructure management, allowing you to concentrate on training, tuning, and inferencing your AI models.

• Custom infrastructure deployments: These deployments utilize various compute, storage and networking options based on the type of workload the user is running. AI Hypercomputer is one way to deploy both HPC workloads that may not require GPU and TPUs, and also AI workloads running TPUs or GPUs.

Networking for managed AI

With Vertex AI you don’t have to worry about the underlying infrastructure. For network connectivity by default the service is accessible via public API. Enterprises that want to use private connectivity have a choice of Private Service Access, Private Google Access, Private Service Connect endpoints and Private Service Connect for Google APIs. The option you choose will vary based on the specific Vertex AI service you are using. You can learn more in the Accessing Vertex AI from on-premises and multicloud documentation.

Networking AI infrastructure deployments

An organization has data located in another cloud, and would like to deploy an AI cluster with GPUs on Google Cloud. Let’s look at a sample case. 

Based on this need, you need to analyze the networking based on planning, data ingestion, training and inference.

• Planning: This crucial initial phase involves defining your requirements, the size of the cluster (number of GPUs), the type of GPUs needed, the desired region and zone for deployment, storage and anticipated network bandwidth for transfers. This planning informs the subsequent steps. For instance, training large language models like LLaMA which has billions of parameters requires a significantly larger cluster than fine-tuning smaller models.

• Data ingestion: Since the data is located in another cloud, you need a high-speed connection so that the data can be accessed directly or transferred to a storage option in Google Cloud. To facilitate this, Cross-Cloud Interconnect offers a direct connection at high bandwidth with a choice of 10Gbps or 100Gbps per link. Alternatively if the data is located on-premises, you can use Cloud Interconnect.

• Training: Training workloads demand high-bandwidth, low-latency, and lossless cluster networking. You can achieve GPU-to-GPU communication that bypasses the system OS with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). Google Cloud networking supports the RDMA over converged ethernet (RoCE) protocol in special network VPCs using the RDMA network profile. Proximity is important so nodes and clusters need to be as close to each other as possible for best performance.

• Inference: Inference requires low-latency connectivity to endpoints, which can be exposed via connectivity options like Network Connectivity Center (NCC), Cloud VPN, VPC network peering and Private Services Connect.

In the example above we use:

• Cross-Cloud Interconnect to connect to Google Cloud to meet the high speed connection requirement

• RDMA networking with RoCE, since we want to optimize our accelerators and have planned requirements.

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as a compute option on which to deploy our cluster.

Learn more

To learn more about networking for AI workloads please explore the following:

• Cross-Cloud Network: Accelerating the Enterprise AI Journey with Cross-Cloud Network

• Compute: Blackwell is here — new A4 VMs powered by NVIDIA B200 now in preview

• Blog: New updates to AI Hypercomputer

Want to ask a question, find out more or share a thought? Please connect with me on Linkedin.

Threat actors who target cloud environments are increasingly focusing on exploiting compromised cloud identities. A compromise of human or non-human identities can lead to increased risks, including cloud resource abuse and sensitive data exfiltration. These risks are exacerbated by the sheer number of identities in most organizations; as they grow, the attack surface they represent also grows. 

As described in the latest Google Cloud Threat Horizons Report, organizations should prioritize measures that can strengthen identity protection. 

“We recommend that organizations incorporate automation and awareness strategies such as strong password policies, mandatory multi-factor authentication, regular reviews of user access and cloud storage bucket security, leaked credential monitoring on the dark web, and account lockout mechanisms,” said Iain Mulholland, senior director, Security Engineering, in last week’s Cloud CISO Perspectives newsletter.

Today, we are detailing key risk mitigations from Google Cloud security experts that you can quickly act on. Every organization should evaluate these mitigations as part of their efforts to protect their cloud deployments.

Google Cloud’s built-in protections 

Google Cloud provides always-on account protection measures that help mitigate credential theft. Many of these protections are based on heuristics that detect likely credential theft and terminate an attacker’s session. Others limit the use of suspected stolen cookies to minutes, instead of hours. 

Google Cloud requires users to reauthenticate to confirm the validity of their credentials before allowing many sensitive actions in the Cloud Console. This reauthentication can happen deterministically or based on a risk score. 

Google Cloud sets default Organization Policies on newly created organizations to guard against common risks of service credential theft and sharing of resources. 

However, as attacker tactics evolve, it’s important to have additional layers of defense in place spanning multi-factor authentication (MFA), protecting sessions, protecting service credentials, identity and access controls, and security monitoring.

Google Cloud customers are encouraged to adopt the following measures to help increase protection against credential theft:

1. Multi-factor authentication (MFA): As part of our shared fate approach to help customers, we recently described our plans to make MFA mandatory for all Google Cloud users this year. If you have not enabled MFA yet, you can take these steps in advance of mandatory enforcement:

1. Enable MFA on your primary Identity Provider (IdP). For Google Cloud customers who use Google Cloud Identity as their primary IdP, follow these instructions.

2. Add an MFA instrument to Google Cloud Identity accounts for re-authentication. If Google Cloud Identity is not your primary IdP, this provides an independent layer of verification prior to allowing sensitive actions. Follow these instructions.

3. Configure your IdP to always challenge (ideally with MFA) when accessing Google. When Google Cloud customers use Cloud Identity with their own IdP through SAML or OIDC, Cloud Identity queries the IdP for an attestation when the session expires or when Google Cloud requires re-authentication. In the default configuration, IdPs silently approve all these attestations to minimize user friction. However, most IdPs can be configured to always require re-entering credentials, and even to always require MFA whenever Google Cloud requests an attestation. This configuration can be set up to only apply to the app representing Google Cloud, and not for all apps that the IdP federates for a smoother user and administrative experience.

1. Limiting session length can reduce the usefulness of stolen cookies. The default session length is 16 hours, and is user-configurable. Here are instructions for setting session length, and you can read more on session length management.

2. Limiting IPs allowed to access Cloud Console and APIs with Context-Aware Access (CAA) can make stolen credentials useless (unless the attacker has access to allowlisted IPs, such as the corporate network or VPN IPs.)

3. Certificate-based access can be used to require mTLS certificates to access Cloud Console and Google Cloud APIs. mTLS provides strong protection against cookie theft, requiring users to present an mTLS certificate in addition to existing credentials such as cookies. mTLS certificates are typically stored in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) of the user’s device, making them extremely difficult for an attacker to steal. Many enterprises already deploy mTLS certificates to their users, and Google Cloud allows customers to either reuse their existing mTLS certificates, or use new ones just for Google Cloud.

4. Contextual-access restrictions can be configured with Access Context Manager, which allows Google Cloud organization administrators to define fine-grained, attribute based access control for projects and resources. Access levels can be configured to require additional device and user attributes to be met in order for a resource request to be successful. For example, you can require that a corporate-managed be used to access and configure resources.

1. Disable creation of service account keys: This Organization Policy setting prevents users from creating persistent keys for service accounts. Instead of allowing unqualified use of service account keys, choose the right authentication method for your use case, and allow exceptions for service account keys only for scenarios that cannot use more secure alternatives.

2. Disable leaked service account keys automatically: Google Cloud regularly scans public repositories (including Github and Gitlab) for leaked service account keys. If Google Cloud detects an exposed key, it will automatically disable the key. It also creates a Cloud Audit Logs event and sends a notification about the exposed key to project owners and security contacts. We strongly recommend not modifying the DISABLE_KEY option (which is on by default).

3. Binding service account keys to trusted networks: Context Aware Access for service accounts enables customers to bind service accounts to an IP-range or specific VPC networks, and enforce that service accounts can access Google Cloud services and APIs only from these trusted networks. Customers can request early access to this control using this form. 

1. Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you grant granular access to specific Google Cloud resources and can help prevent access to other resources. Permissions are grouped into roles, and roles are granted to authenticated principals. You should regularly review and right-size permissions using tools such as IAM Recommender. The Google Cloud Architecture Framework provides additional best practices for managing identity and access.

2. VPC Service Controls enable a powerful, context-aware approach to control access for your cloud resources. You can create granular access control policies based on attributes such as user identity and IP address. These policies ensure specific security controls are in place before granting access to cloud resources from untrusted networks. By allowing access only from authorized networks, VPC Service Controls helps protect against the risk of data exfiltration presented by clients using stolen OAuth or service account credentials.

3. Principal access boundaries can precisely define the resources that a principal is eligible to access. If a policy makes a principal ineligible to access a resource, then their access to that resource is limited regardless of the roles they’ve been granted.

4. Restrict identities by domain using domain-restricted sharing to limit role grants to users belonging to a specific domain or organization. When domain restricted sharing is active, only principals that belong to allowed domains or organizations can be granted IAM roles in your Google Cloud organization.

1. Security Command Center (SCC) is Google Cloud’s built-in security and risk management platform. It provides comprehensive security posture management, threat detection, and compliance monitoring.

   With SCC’s Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) capabilities, you can manage which identities have access to which resources in your deployments, mitigate potential vulnerabilities that result from misconfigurations, and enforce the principle of least privilege. The Sensitive Actions Service within SCC automatically detects and alerts on potentially damaging actions occurring across your cloud organization, folders, and projects. SCC’s Virtual Red Teaming capability continuously detects if high value resources are exposed and surfaces the identities and access paths that could lead to compromise.

Next steps

Maintaining a strong security posture requires ongoing evaluation of the risks your organization faces, and the controls you have in place to address them. These recommendations can help you strengthen your cloud estate against the growing risks associated with credential compromise.

You can learn more about protecting your Google Cloud deployments in our security Best Practices Center.

2025 is off to a racing start. From announcing strides in the new Gemini 2.0 model family to retailers accelerating with Cloud AI, we spent January investing in our partner ecosystem, open-source, and ways to make AI more useful. We’ve heard from people everywhere, from developers to CMOs, about the pressure to adapt the latest in AI with efficiency and speed – and the delicate balance of being both conservative and forward-thinking. We’re here to help. Each month, we’ll post a retrospective that recaps Google Cloud’s latest announcements in AI – and importantly, how to make the most of these innovations. 

Top announcements: Bringing AI to you 

This month, we announced agent evaluation in Vertex AI. A surprise to nobody, AI agents are top of mind for many industries looking to deploy their AI and boost productivity. But closing the gap between impressive model demos and real-world performance is crucial for successfully deploying generative AI. That’s why we announced Vertex AI’s RAG Engine, a fully managed service that helps you build and deploy RAG implementations with your data and methods. Together, these new innovations can help you build reliable, trustworthy models.

From an infrastructure perspective, we announced new updates to AI Hypercomputer. We wanted to make it easier for you to run large multi-node workloads on GPUs by launching A3 Ultra VMs and Hypercompute Cluster, our new highly scalable clustering system. This builds on multiple advancements in AI infrastructure, including Trillium, our sixth-generation TPU.

What’s new in partners and open-source 

This month, we invested in our relationship with our partners. We shared how Gemini-powered content creation in Partner Marketing Studio will help partners co-market faster. These features are designed to streamline marketing efforts across our entire ecosystem, empowering our partners to unlock new levels of success, efficiency, and impact. 

At the same time, we shared several important announcements in the world of open-source. We announced Mistral AI’s Mistral Large 24.11 and Codestral 25.01 models on Vertex AI. These models will help developers write code and build faster – from high-complexity tasks to reasoning tasks, like creative writing. To help you get started, we provided sample code and documentation.

And, most recently, we announced the public beta of Gen AI Toolbox for Databases in partnership with LangChain, the leading orchestration framework for developers building LLM applications. Toolbox is an open-source server that empowers application developers to connect production-grade, agent-based generative AI applications to databases. You can get started here.

Industry news: Google Cloud at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 

The National Retail Federation kicked off the year with their annual NRF conference, where Google Cloud showed how AI agents and AI-powered search are already helping retailers operate more efficiently, create personalized shopping experiences, and use AI to get the latest products and experiences to their customers. Check our new AI tools to help retailers build gen AI search and agents. 

As an example, Google Cloud worked with NVIDIA to empower retailers to boost their customer engagements in exciting new ways, deliver more hyper-personalized recommendations, and build their own AI applications and agents. Now with NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise software available on Google Cloud, retailers can handle more data and more complex AI tasks without their systems getting bogged down.

News you can use 

This month, we shared several ways to better implement fast-moving AI, from a comprehensive guide on Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), to how developers can help their LLMs deliver more accurate, relevant, and contextually aware responses, minimizing hallucinations and building trust in AI applications by optimizing their RAG retrieval.

We also published new documentation to use open models in Vertex AI Studio. Model selection isn’t limited to Google’s Gemini anymore. Now, choose models from Anthropic, Meta, and more when writing or comparing prompts.

Hear from our leaders

We closed out the month with The Prompt, our monthly column that brings observations from the field of AI. This month, we heard from Warren Barkley, AI product leader, who shares some best practices and essential guidance to help organizations successfully move AI pilots to production. Here’s a snippet:

More than 60% of enterprises are now actively using gen AI in production, helping to boost productivity and business growth, bolster security, and improve user experiences. In the last year alone, we witnessed a staggering 36x increase in Gemini API usage and a nearly 5x increase of Imagen API usage on Vertex AI — clear evidence that our customers are making the move towards bringing gen AI to their real-world applications.

Stay tuned for monthly updates on Google Cloud’s AI announcements, news, and best practices. For a deeper dive into the latest from Google Cloud, read our weekly updates, The Overwhelmed Person’s Guide to Google Cloud.

We are excited to announce the availability of datasets on Google Cloud Marketplace through BigQuery Analytics Hub, opening up new avenues for organizations to power innovative analytics use cases and procure data for enterprise business needs. As a centralized procurement platform, Google Cloud Marketplace offers access to a wide array of enterprise applications, foundational AI models, LLMs, and now, commercial and free datasets from third-party data providers and Google. BigQuery Analytics Hub enables cross-organizational zero-copy sharing at scale, with governance, security, and encryption all built in natively. 

This deep integration between Google Cloud Marketplace and Analytics Hub not only simplifies data procurement for customers, but also helps data providers extend reach to a global audience and unlock additional business opportunities. Let’s delve into the various benefits this development brings.

Streamlined data procurement for customers

The introduction of BigQuery datasets on Google Cloud Marketplace offers numerous advantages for customers looking to access high-quality datasets to power analytics, AI and to optimize business applications. We offer a wide variety of datasets, including commercial data products from leading providers such as Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, and Weather Source, a Pelmorex company. Data teams can now easily find, buy, and consume datasets from a centralized, comprehensive catalog — the same place where they discover generative AI, analytics and business applications that integrate with or run on Google Cloud. By simplifying the data discovery and procurement process, businesses can allocate their resources more efficiently, reduce administrative burden, and accelerate data and AI-driven initiatives. Dataset purchased from the Google Cloud Marketplace can draw down the customer’s Google Cloud commitment.

Immediate access to purchased data

Upon purchasing a dataset, customers can gain instant access to it within their BigQuery environment through Analytics Hub. By subscribing to a purchased BigQuery dataset in Analytics Hub, a linked dataset is immediately created in the customer’s own Google Cloud project. This allows businesses to swiftly integrate procured data with their own data without requiring data movement or replication, expedite analytical processes, and accelerate time-to-value. By eliminating the delays commonly associated with data procurement and by streamlining data delivery time, organizations can quickly leverage the acquired data to inform strategic decisions and drive innovation.

Cost control, security and governance

Customers procuring datasets through Google Cloud Marketplace can benefit significantly from cost savings, as linked datasets in Analytics Hub are live pointers to shared data and require no data copying, and there are no extra replication or storage costs to account for. In addition, customers can reduce billing sprawl with consolidated billing for Google Cloud services, third-party ISV solutions, and now datasets. A recent Google Cloud commissioned IDC study¹ found that Google Cloud Marketplace can help customers lower spending on third-party solutions by 21.2% on average, largely due to avoiding unnecessary purchases, reducing duplicative spend, and leveraging committed spend discounts. Customers gain cost efficiencies and improved time-to-value opportunities by consolidating contracts across their entire organization. 

On the security front, Google Cloud provides robust features to support data protection. Analytics Hub natively supports provider and subscriber project isolation, helping to ensure that commercial data can be safely shared across organizational boundaries. Customers can also apply specific security configurations via BigQuery and Analytics Hub, including Virtual Private Cloud Service Controls support, allowing for tailored access controls to help safeguard from unauthorized access. 

Furthermore, organizations can maintain governance and control over the solutions in use by turning on the Google Cloud Private Marketplace capability, enabling a curated collection of trusted products — including datasets — that can be discovered, procured and used by their data analyst teams. With Private Marketplace, administrators can maintain control over which datasets are used, yet also ensure that governance controls do not hinder productivity by turning on the ability for end-users to request additional products be made available. The same IDC study found that managing third-party software purchases through Google Cloud Marketplace can result in 31% productivity gains for compliance teams¹.

Data providers extend reach to customers

Data provider partners get significant advantages by listing their offerings on Google Cloud Marketplace, gaining access to a wider customer base, facilitating market expansion and business growth. With a streamlined onboarding process, data providers can create new revenue channels by efficiently making their datasets available to new customers. 

Once the transaction is completed in Google Cloud Marketplace, Analytics Hub automatically enables customer access to the data provider’s data, minimizing friction for sellers and customers. In addition, the integration with Analytics Hub means data updates are propagated instantly, so that end users have access to the most current information, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Google Cloud Marketplace supports dataset transactions via the agency model, which at the time of this announcement is enabled for customers and partners based in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Unlock monetization opportunities

Google Cloud Marketplace opens up various monetization opportunities for data provider partners. Those who already have data in BigQuery can quickly share at scale with Analytics Hub, commercialize, list, and unlock new income streams through Google Cloud Marketplace. Integration opportunities between Analytics Hub and Google Cloud Marketplace further enable partners to capitalize on the intrinsic value of their data, expanding their monetization strategies and maximizing revenue potential.

Partners have the flexibility to transact with customers via public, off-the-shelf pricing or through custom-negotiated private offers. They can set up fixed-fee subscriptions and customize payment schedules for data offerings without needing complex technical integrations, simplifying the process of generating revenue. Leverage Google Cloud’s standard agreements or provide your own. Finally, with Analytics Hub usage metrics and subscription management, data providers can easily analyze usage behavior, identify patterns, and add or revoke subscriptions, all within a single pane of glass. And if they execute campaigns to drive traffic to Google Cloud Marketplace dataset offerings, they can track traffic and conversion in the Analytics dashboard within Google Cloud Marketplace Producer Portal. Whether it’s through fixed subscriptions or through offering advanced data services, partners have numerous ways to monetize data effectively on our platform.

Data provider partners are excited about the business opportunities and customer use cases that BigQuery datasets on Google Cloud Marketplace can help deliver.

“Driving adoption of Dun & Bradstreet data through joint-go-to-market is a key pillar of our partnership with Google Cloud. We are excited about the ability for our mutual customers to seamlessly transact Dun & Bradstreet’s high-quality and trusted data on the Google Cloud Marketplace and immediately unlock powerful analytics and real-time insights. Having more of our AI-ready data on BigQuery helps organizations be deliberate about their data strategy.” – Isabel Gomez Vidal, Chief Revenue Office, Dun & Bradstreet

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud to make Equifax data available on Google Cloud Marketplace and Analytics Hub represents a significant step forward in data accessibility. By leveraging this platform, our customers can now integrate Equifax insights seamlessly into their existing workflows, driving innovation and informed decision-making.” – Felipe Castillo, Chief Product Officer, US Information Solutions, Equifax

“We are proud to be an early adopter of the Google Cloud Marketplace and we are looking forward to building upon our initial success leveraging the integrated functionality in BigQuery. Google Cloud Marketplace has accelerated lead capturing, procurement, and delivery of our data assets, allowing our teams to focus on unlocking business opportunities with our mutual customers.” – Craig Stelmach, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Sales, Weather Source, a Pelmorex Company 

Analytics Hub and Google Cloud Marketplace are helping to reshape the landscape of how customers and data providers make the most out of data to power the next generation of AI and enterprise use cases. Learn more about Analytics Hub and explore datasets on Google Cloud Marketplace.

^{1. IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Google Cloud, The Business Value of Google Cloud Marketplace for Acquiring Third-Party Software, doc #US52630724, January 2025}