News

A Google Account Purge Is Coming. Will You Be Affected?

In an email and blog post titled, “Updating our inactive account policies,” Google has warned users of the upcoming deletion of inactive accounts.

Published

3 years ago

November 15, 2023

Nour Nasir

a google account purge is coming will you be affected

Google has revealed plans to delete any dormant accounts that haven’t been used over the past two years, starting on December 1st. All messages, photos, and other data will also be wiped during the upcoming purge.

Google’s vice president of product management, Ruth Kricheli, wrote in a blog post that the company is updating its inactivity policy for Google (and Google Workspace) accounts that have not been used or signed into for at least two years, explaining that all content contained in Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar, and Google Photos will also be axed — though business and school accounts will be unaffected.

“This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised, haven’t had two-factor authentication set up, and receive fewer security checks by the user,” Kricheli says in the blog post. “Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step verification set up. These accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam”.

Also Read: You Can Now Delete Threads And Keep Your Instagram Account

There are now 1.8 billion active Google account users worldwide, so the upcoming purge could lead to millions of deleted Gmail addresses. Unfortunately, if you expect to find it easier to grab a catchy new address, think again. The company will not release purged Gmail handles back into circulation due to fears they could be used to impersonate their old owners.

Should you be worried about Google’s December 1st plans? You’ll be completely fine if you’ve logged in to a Google account during the last 2 years. However, if you’re paranoid about an old account getting wiped, you should login and send yourself an email for extra peace of mind.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

Also Read: Dubai Says Its Deepfake Detector Needs Just 7 Seconds Of Video

“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.