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.
In 2016, X began working on a moonshot that aimed to take on cybersecurity. In 2018, that team graduated from X to become Chronicle, a new independent business within Alphabet tackling cybercrime. After developing the security telemetry platform, Backstory, Chronicle announced that they would be joining forces with the Google Cloud team to help more businesses defend against cyber security threats.
Chronicle is finding a way to bring greater speed and insight to security teams struggling to stay ahead of cyber-criminals.
Helping organizations see their full security picture in higher resolution
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 that’s available to search and analyze.
Chronicle 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.
By combining machine learning, large amounts of computing power, and considerable amounts of storage, Chronicle helps teams find patterns in huge volumes of data that aren’t easily spotted even by trained experts, giving organizations a much higher-resolution view of their security situation than they’ve ever had. The aim is to reduce the damage caused by cybercrime by shortening the time between when an attack occurs and when it’s discovered.
Getting on the front foot
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.