Alphabet launches Chronicle, a cybersecurity firm that aims to fight off hackers

Alphabet, the parent company of Google has unveiled a new cybersecurity company that aims to make a business by preventing cyber attacks. The new company called Chronicle is betting on the premise that machine learning software, a type of artificial intelligence, can sift and analyze massive stores of data to detect cyber threats more quickly and precisely than is possible with traditional methods.

Stephen Gillett, who previously was the COO of Symantec, is the CEO of Chronicle. Gillett in a blog post wrote, "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 notes that it will run on Alphabet’s infrastructure and use machine learning and advanced search capabilities to help businesses analyze their security data. Chronicle puts an emphasis on speed and ease to provide tools for companies to understand its volumes of data, and unlock “hidden insights.”

The goal is to provide security teams enough time to protect themselves against possible cyber attacks via vulnerabilities in their defenses, and the way they manage data across networks and campuses.

Chronicle will offer two services: a security intelligence and analytics platform for enterprises, and VirusTotal, the online malware and virus scanner that Google acquired in 2012.

Chronicle, based at Alphabet’s Mountain View, California, becomes the third business spun out of the company’s “X” research lab and into the holding company—a process it calls “graduating.” It follows healthcare unit Verily and self-driving vehicle company Waymo.