Alphabet this week announced the launch of a new company to fight against cybercrime. Chronicle will rely on Google's machine-learning technology.
Stephen Gillett, Chronicle chief executive officer, describes in a blog post how the company got its start as an X project in the moonshot factory in February 2016. Engineers spent the past two years trying to determine where the technology had the greatest potential to make the biggest impact on this enormous problem.
Gillett, who spent four years at Symantec as chief operating officer, wrote that it's common for hackers to go undetected for months, or for it to take a team months to fully understand what’s going on once they’ve detected an issue. It creates an overwhelming number of data breaches and damage that drive up security costs.
Chronicle has two parts aimed at supporting large corporations: a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that can manage and understand security-related data; and VirusTotal, a malware intelligence service acquired by Google in 2012 that will continue to operate as it has for the last few years.
"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," he wrote, so engineers built the intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.
Chronicle has been working with Fortune 500 companies to develop the technology. Some of these companies have tested a preview of the cybersecurity intelligence platform in an early alpha program.
The company will have its own contracts and data policies with customers.