Engineers work to keep net safe
Canadians spot trouble before it hits your device
They work all day long, writing code, sometimes breaking out a guitar to strum through a tough problem. The room is well-lit and when they start talking, the jargon they speak becomes algorithms necessary to surf every inch of the Internet and find infections lurking in any kind of website — commercial, government or even a school’s web page.
From an office in Montreal, this small team of Google engineers is tasked with a massive job: Protect the world from online malware.
“We make the Internet safer,” said engineer Fabrice Jaubert.
“We look at millions of pages a day and we can count the number of times we’re wrong on the one hand by the end of the year,” he said. “When we say something is bad, it really is bad.”
For just over five years, this small team (Google won’t say precisely how many people work at the office) has been trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys who want to make life online less secure for the average user. And Canadians provide these websites with lots of time to infect their machines: According to ComScore, Canadians spend about 45 hours per month online, continuing to lead the world in Internet use.
Internet users are expected to face increasing number of complex types of threats in 2013 as more criminal activity moves online. More websites began injecting ransomware onto computers in 2012, encrypting the data and holding it ransom until a user paid up — expected to increase in 2013, according to security firms Symantec and Sophos. IT security providers also expect to see more malware targeting browsers to quietly run malicious programs on multiple devices.
And the best way to get all this malware onto your device? It’s still the Internet, according to Sophos.
“Every website out there … seems to get hit equally,” Jaubert said.
About six years ago, a Google engineer proposed the idea of supple- menting some of the antivirus and safe browsing data already available with an ongoing effort to find infected websites before they became a problem for users. The software on the market didn’t make the web 100 per cent secure so a constant search for bad sites online was needed to bolster defences.
After a successful demonstration, Google founded the team and placed it in Montreal. A second team deals with phishing scams, which trick users into downloading malware and then sending sensitive information to cyber-criminals. The two teams work a continent apart.
The office in Montreal is fairly quiet. The systems are all automated so all the engineers have to do is make sure they’re running fine while finetuning their search algorithms.
There are toys everywhere. The room is well-lit. Some engineers play guitars when they have a tough problem to sort through.
The algorithms have computers search the web, visit websites and observe the site’s behaviour and traffic. When the algorithm picks up a problem, the website is flagged and a report is delivered to the Montreal team. It then tries to get in touch with the website’s administrator to have the problem resolved while also adding the information to databases designed to help webmasters understand infec-