Google has trained 40,000 people in cybersecurity so far: Vice President

Google has trained over 40,000 individuals through its cybersecurity roadshows and developer sessions in India, as part of its commitment to upskill 100,000 people, said Royal Hansen, Vice President of Engineering for Privacy, Safety, and Security at Google.

The tech giant has organised its flagship event Google for India here on Monday.

Speaking at the sidelines of the event, Hansen said India was very similar to the US and Europe in terms of challenges and work in the domain of cybersecurity.

“Whether it is nation-state attacks, ransomware and criminal gangs, or it is hactivism and hack for hire, it is the same thing that we see in Europe, the US and India,” he said. “India is on the radar–good or bad–in the cybersecurity.”

The senior executive said the number of cyber incidents were staggering and continued to grow. Google’s detection and response team deals with billions of cybersecurity-related events every day. It even borders a trillion, Hansen said, adding that events may refer to very different things.

“You can’t solve those problems with just humans reacting. You have to constantly tune the artificial intelligence models so that humans can spend their time on very difficult, nuanced decisions,” Hansen said, adding that the company looks at its engagement with society at large as a very important thing.

“All of our coding and security coding-related tools use AI to find common vulnerabilities. We are applying that to open-source packages, not just our clossd-source packages,” Hansen said.