Alphabet Launches AI-Focused Hacker-Fighting Business

Alphabet announced that it has launched Chronicle, a cybersecurity company that will enable companies to detect and prevent cyberattacks.

Chronicle is currently offering two services: a new security intelligence and analytics platform for companies, as well as VirusTotal, an online malware and virus scanner acquired by Google in 2012.

Alphabet noted that the services are now being tested out by a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Chronicle is a product of X, the company’s moonshot group, but will now operate as an independent company within Alphabet. Stephen Gillett, who came to X from Google Ventures and was previously the COO of Symantec, will serve as Chronicle’s CEO.

“Security threats are growing faster than security teams and budgets can keep up, and there’s already a huge talent shortage,” Gillett wrote in a blog post. “The proliferation of data from the dozens of security products that a typical large organization deploys is paradoxically making it harder, not easier, for teams to detect and investigate threats.

“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,” the blog post continued. “We are building our intelligence and analytics platform to solve this problem.”

Gillett went on to explain that one solid advantage of Chronicle is that it will be running on “the same fast, powerful, highly scalable infrastructure that powers a range of other Alphabet initiatives that require enormous processing power and storage.”

That means companies should be able to search for, retrieve and run analysis on information in minutes, as well as utilize greater amounts of storage for less cost . This should give them the ability to study emerging patterns from multiple data sources throughout the years.

“Add in some machine learning and better search capabilities, and we think we’ll be able to help organizations see their full security picture in much higher fidelity than they currently can,” noted Gillett.