Google’s parent company Alphabet has announced it is creating a new cybersecurity company, Chronicle, to detect and fight hackers.
The new company has been spun out from Alphabet’s so-called X moonshot factory.
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It began back in 2016 and has been growing and working under the moonshot branch. Over the past two years, it has been working with Fortune 500 companies to develop its new proposition.
Other moonshot projects include Project Loon, a connectivity initiative that uses solar-powered balloons to provide wireless networks.
Chronicle is going to be led by Stephen Gillett, who started working on the project two years ago after moving over from Google Ventures.
In a blog post, Gillet said that Chronicle is going to be dedicated to helping companies find and stop cyber attacks before they cause harm.
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By GlobalDataThe new startup will have two parts, according to Gillett. The first part is an intelligence and analytics platform that companies can use to better manage and understand their security data. As well, VirusTotal is also going to be a part of Chronicle’s work. This is a malware intelligence service acquired by Google back in 2012.
What will Alphabet’s cybersecurity company Chronicle actually do?
Chronicle says it wants to speed up the work security teams do in catching and analysing threats.
Gillett said:
We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.
As well, the company is going to draw on Alphabet’s enormous processing power and storage to speed up search and analysis.
[This] should help them see patterns that emerge from multiple data sources and over years.
Chronicle will also employ machine learning capabilities to help organisations see their “full security picture.”
Gillett said:
“We hope that by making this mix of technologies available to more companies at affordable prices, we can give “the good guys” an advantage and help us all turn the tide against cybercrime.”
It makes sense that a new Google-powered cybersecurity would turn to machine learning, given Google’s expertise in the technology. But it’s not just Google. There is a growing trend of security companies using tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) to handle cyber attacks.
Marco Essomba, co-founder and chief technology officer at security consultancy iCyber-Security, told Verdict:
“Humans can’t keep up with a number of attacks and the type of advanced persistent threats, as they’re called. It’s quite obvious that we need to use AI to tackle the workload.”
