Alphabet Launches Chronicle Cybersecurity Company From Famed Google X Moonshot Labs

Back in 2016, Google's parent company Alphabet started a new cybersecurity project at its X Moonshot lab. Now two years later, that project is graduating into a standalone company called Chronicle, with the aim of helping other firms find and stop cyber attacks before they can cause any harm. It will do this through a continually honed intelligence and analytics platform designed to rapidly identify and neutralize threats.

In a blog post announcing the standalone outfit, Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett explains that it's fairly common for hackers to go undetected for months, and that it can take equally long for a security team to fully grasp what is going on once they detect a security threat. In the time that elapses, companies are susceptible to more data breaches and damage, and higher costs from the fallout.

"We believe there’s a better way. 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. We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem," Gillett said.

Chronicle consist of two main parts. The first is the aforementioned intelligence and analytics platform that will help enterprises better manage and understand their own security related data. And the other is Virustotal, a malware intelligence service that Google acquired in 2012. The latter will continue to operate as it has for the past several years, only now it will be part of Chronicle.

The full extent of what Chronicle will offer was not detailed in the blog post, though Gillett did reference the use of machine learning and Alphabet's search capabilities. He also talked about some other advantages that Chronicle brings to the table, such as "enormous processing power and storage."

"We’ll have our own contracts and data policies with our customers, while at the same time having the benefit of being able to consult the world-class experts in machine learning and cloud computing (among many other topics) that reside in other parts of Alphabet," Gillett added.

Several Fortune 500 companies are currently alpha testing Chronicle's service.