Chronicle
Helping companies find and stop cyberattacks
Chronicle was X’s moonshot for cybersecurity. In 2018, that team graduated from X to become Chronicle, a new independent business within Alphabet, focused on tackling cybercrime. After developing Backstory, a security telemetry platform, Chronicle announced that it would be joining forces with the Google Cloud team to help more businesses defend against cybersecurity threats.
The Chronicle team in a cybersecurity design sprint
A Rise In Cyberattacks
Cyberattacks are increasing faster than companies can hire and train professionals to fight them. The hackers who commit cyber crimes are professionals with clear long-term goals. They’re meticulous, skilled, and patiently work their way through companies’ defenses. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise security team to discover an attack months after it has started, and for it to take months to understand the extent of the damage.
The proliferation of security-related data in an organization makes it harder, not easier, to detect and investigate threats. It takes security teams far too long to find what’s truly relevant — sometimes they’re slowed by too much information, and other times there are gaps in the information available to search and analyze.
Chronicle looked for ways to bring greater speed and insight to security teams struggling to stay ahead of cyber-criminals. The project was born from a belief that we could increase the speed and impact of security teams if it were much easier, faster, and more cost-effective for them to capture and analyze security-related clues from across their organizations. In early 2016, Chronicle began developing a cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform to help enterprise teams better manage and understand their security-related data.
Chronicle is finding a way to bring greater speed and insight to security teams struggling to stay ahead of cyber-criminals.
Chronicle Today
By combining machine learning, large amounts of computing power, and considerable amounts of storage, Chronicle helped teams find patterns in huge volumes of data that weren’t easily spotted, even by trained experts — giving organizations a much higher-resolution view of their security situation than ever before. The aim was to reduce the damage caused by cybercrime by shortening the time between an attack occurring and its detection.
As an independent company, Chronicle developed its own relationships with enterprises looking to prevent cyber attacks. In 2019, Chronicle joined Google Cloud’s portfolio of security offerings. Chronicle products integrated into Google Cloud included VirusTotal malware intelligence services and Backstory investigation flows, which allowed customers to detect and mitigate threats faster.
Chronicle combines large amounts of storage, computing power, and machine learning to bring better visibility to cyberattacks.
Chronicle is currently working with customers and partners to turn the tide against a widening array of vulnerabilities and attackers. The reality for most companies today is still reactive: find and clean up the damage. The real moonshot, which is several years away, is predicting and deflecting cyberattacks proactively.
