Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.
As Jeanette mentioned, I'm the director of Google's threat analysis group, or TAG. While I'm personally based in Australia, we are a global team, a significant part of which is based in Google's Montreal office, which I'm sure this committee well knows is a growing hub of cybersecurity talent and expertise.
Our global team of analysts and security experts works closely with product teams to analyze and counter threats to our platform and our users, including threats from government-backed attackers, serious cybercriminals and information operations.
Hostile actors continue to attempt to access and misuse our platforms, and Google has invested heavily over many years to counter attempts to deceive, harm or take advantage of users. We don't just mitigate security risks; we work to eliminate entire classes of threats for consumers and businesses whose work and lives depend on the Internet.
On any given day, TAG tracks more than 270 targeted or government-backed attacker groups from more than 50 countries. We publish a quarterly bulletin about actions we take against accounts that we attribute to coordinated influence campaigns. For instance, in the third quarter of 2023, we reported disabling influence campaigns originating from groups including Russia, Iran, China and Mexico.
We are particularly focused on disrupting coordinated influence operations on YouTube. For example, since January 2023, we terminated more than 2,400 YouTube channels linked to Russia and more than 60,000 channels linked to China as part of our investigations into this activity. These actions are in addition to YouTube's ongoing enforcement of community guidelines, which resulted in the removal of more than eight million videos globally in the third quarter of 2023.
As we discover and disrupt operations, we take steps to protect users, disclose information publicly and share our findings with industry and government partners to support the entire ecosystem. We also issue warnings to our users when we believe that they have been targeted by a government-backed attack.
While this work is never done, we continue to take action, identify bad actors and share relevant information to protect users and prevent future attacks.
We would like to thank the committee for your attention to this critical issue and for allowing us to share more on our work to keep Canadians safe and our investments in the right expertise to protect users on our platform. We remain committed to partnering with the Canadian government to ensure a stronger and safer digital future for all Canadians.
We look forward to answering your questions.