Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has launched a new cybersecurity company called Chronicle that will use machine learning to stop cybercrime in its tracks. The Chronicle team first came together in 2016 as part of X, the experimental division Alphabet calls the “moonshot factory,” and is now being spun into its own company.
What makes Chronicle unique are the resources it has at its disposal. Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett explained in a blog post that the intelligence and analytics platforms employed by Chronicle run on the same infrastructure used by other Alphabet companies that require “enormous amounts of power and storage.”
Gillett says this will give it two big advantages. First, it “should be able to help teams search and retrieve useful information and run analysis in minutes, rather than the hours or days it currently takes.” It will also allow them to provide storage in greater amounts and at a lower cost than other cybersecurity companies.
“We want to 10x the speed and impact of security teams’ work by making it much easier, faster and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security signals that have previously been too difficult and expensive to find,” Gillet wrote. “We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”
Chronicle is made up of two parts: a cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform and VirusTotal, a malware service Google acquired in 2012. Its goal is what you’d expect from a cybersecurity company: to find and stop online threats before they cause harm. But it has a unique approach to snuffing out cybercriminals by using machine learning and search.
“The information that security teams need to identify and investigate attacks is right there in an organization’s existing security tools and IT systems, but it’s hidden in enormous volumes of data and therefore can’t easily be seen, understood, or used,” said Astro Teller, CEO of X.
It’s still unclear how Chronicle will market its forthcoming products. It’s still only testing an early alpha preview of its cybersecurity intelligence platform.
