Google's G Suite adds threat alerts

Google has taken its Alert Centre threat notification system out of beta and made it generally available for its cloud-based G Suite enterprise productivity software, providing a unified early warning system for administrators.

The Alert Centre displays warnings when it detects phishing or malware seeding attempts directed against Gmail accounts, and tracks malicious internet protocol addresses using machine learning techniques.

Administrators can also keep an eye on devices they manage, and receive warnings if they have been jailbroken or rooted to allow for installation of software from untrusted sources.

Warnings about government-backed attacks are on by default in Alert Centre, which covers seven different scenarios for monitoring user accounts.

Google will also send operations alerts through the service, with details on security and privacy issues that could affect an organisation's G Suite Services.

Along with the alerts, Google provides a help article about the threat warning in question. 

Links to resources that administrators can use to take action to mitigate security problems will also be provided in the Alert Centre, where relevant.

Enterprise edition customers also get access to a dedicated links with pre-configured queries for the G Suite investigation tool next to the alerts, Google said.

Alert Centre is a free addition to G Suite and will be made available for all editions of the productivity stack over the coming two weeks.