Google

Microsoft was the most impersonated brand in worldwide phishing attacks during the third quarter of 2025. 40 percent of such attempts used the company’s name, according to Check Point Research’s Brand Phishing Report for Q3.

Google took the second spot with 9 percent of global phishing activity, while Apple was third with 6 percent. Together, those three names accounted for more than half of all brand impersonation attempts in the period.

Scams and fraud are an ever present threat on the internet and the rise of AI means that they’re getting harder to spot with the old giveaways of bad grammar and dodgy attachments largely eliminated.

Google is announcing a range of new tools and initiatives to help people remain safe online. These include improved app features, new account recovery tools and better education and awareness programs.

Google has announced a series of updates and changes for YouTube, kicking off with a new-look user interface. The updated UI sees various buttons and control elements getting a visual refresh, but there are changes beyond the aesthetic.

An addition that will please many YouTube users is threaded replies. It is now not only possible to reply to comments on a video, but also to reply to those replies and have these comments visible in a tree structure. But there is still more.

With Google Wallet, Google has helped to lighten our load by reducing the number of physical cards and tickets we need to take out with us. Debit and credit cards, loyalty cards, boarding passes, travel tickets and more can be stored electronically and accessed instantly.

But with the widespread switch from physical tickets, passes and cards, there comes a new problem – identifying individual things contained within Google Wallet. With a new update, Google is taking steps to try to address this by adding a new nickname option.

Not content with giving users new control over sponsored results in its search engine, Google has also started the rollout of its AI visual model – known as Nano Banana – into Search.

Accessible from Google Lens and AI Mode, Nano Banana provides easy access to artificial intelligence powered image editing and transformation. We are not talking about boring “remove the background from this photo” type stuff (although this is possible), but rather more creative ideas.

Anyone who has used Google Search will have at some point been frustrated by the appearance of “sponsored results” which are rarely of help. Google has apparently come to the sudden realization that tainting search results in this way is irritating, and is providing a way to quickly hide them.

The problem with “sponsored results” is that they are, essentially, advertisements. While much of Google’s money comes from advertising, inserting paid-for entries in search results has long felt disingenuous and misleading for users. Here is how things are changing.

Google has introduced two AI-powered features to help users stay connected with new and trending content across the web. The updates, available in Google Search and Discover, focus on giving people quick ways to explore stories, sports updates, and links from a wide range of sources.

The first feature expands Discover’s ability to show timely and relevant topics. Users will now see short previews that summarize trending subjects related to their interests that can be expanded to reveal more information and links.

Microsoft’s development of Copilot on Windows 11 continues, and the company has just released significant updates to Insiders which are likely to win it more fans. New connection cap abilities mean that it is possible to use Copilot in conjunction with various online services including Google Calendar and Outlook.

More than this, however, Microsoft has also added new document creation capabilities. Users are now able to quickly create a variety of documents from within their Copilot sessions, including Word, Excel, and PDF.

Navigation tools such as Waze and Google Maps not only help you find a route from A to B, but also provide information about road closure, vehicle breakdowns, police in the area, and hazards on the road. With this last item being reliant on reports from road users, Waze has been investigating ways to make do so easier.

When you spot a hazard on the road and want to warn others, you have had to wait until you are able to stop to do so (safely, at least). Now Waze is rolling out a feature called Conversational Reporting which lets you use your voice – and a dash of AI – to let other road users know about what you have spotted.

Google has released information on a new AI-powered agent that automatically improves code security by fixing critical software vulnerabilities.

CodeMender has been built over the past six months and the company has already upstreamed 72 security fixes to open source projects, including some as large as 4.5 million lines of code.

Anyone who thought command line tools were in danger of being consigned to the history books, Google’s unveiling of Jules Tools put pay to that idea.

For anyone not familiar with Google’s offerings, Jules Tools is a command line interface for its Jules asynchronous coding agent. Google is hardly setting a trend here – there are command line interfaces available for other AIs – but with Jules itself only having launched in December, the speed is a little surprising.

Google has announced that it is now possible to send Gmail end-to-end encrypted emails to anyone. Until this change was introduced, E2E emailing was only supported between Gmail to Gmail communications.

But now email encryption is being opened up and made platform agnostic. While this means that encrypted emails can be sent to anyone, it is something that needs to be enabled, and there are a few things to keep in mind.

It is a little while since Google first started to use an updated version of its colorful G logo. The design revamp saw the company moving away from the four colored blocks of color towards something with more flow.

The graduated look of the G was introduced with little in the way of fanfare, and quite what Google had planned was not clear. Now, having seemingly tested the waters by trying out the new look in a limited number of places, the company is ready to use it more extensively.

There is a lot to feel frustrated about in relation to YouTube, but Google has announced a change that helps to squash one of its annoyances.

While in-video ads are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid – short of paying for the privilege – there is now a way to hide “end screens”. These short snippets at the end of the video you have just watched are a form of advertising used by creators to promote their other content.

The move from passwords to passkeys is making gradual progress, and Google is among the companies pushing to encourage people to make the switch.  Now there are signs that things are being taken up a notch.

Hidden away in the most recent Canary build of Chrome, Google is testing a flag which, when enabled, will automatically convert saved passwords into passkeys when logging into a site or service.