Google parent Alphabet Inc. has spun off its latest “moonshot” company from its X Labs in the form of Chronicle Inc., a company that uses machine learning to assist in detecting cybersecurity intrusions.

Unheard of until today — unlike previous Alphabet X alumni such as former Google Car project Waymo Inc. — Chronicle aims to simplify the lives of cybersecurity and information technology professionals. It’s offering two services: a security intelligence and analytics platform for enterprises and VirusTotal, a malware and virus scanner Google acquired in 2012.

The company claims to use machine learning to detect intrusions more quickly than existing solutions, cutting the time it takes to stop a breach. “The information that security teams need to identify and investigate attacks is right there in an organization’s existing security tools and IT systems, but it’s hidden in enormous volumes of data and therefore can’t easily be seen, understood, or used,” X “Captain of Moonshots” Astro Teller wrote in a Medium post. “Providing better capabilities for finding the patterns in that data might not sound like much, but shrinking the time between when an attack starts and when it’s discovered (from a few months to a few hours or days) could reduce a lot of damage.”

Teller didn’t elaborate much on how the technology works, and Chronicle’s new website doesn’t exactly provide much in the way of explanation either. But a separate Medium post by Stephen Gillett, chief executive of Chronicle, indicated it would be leveraging several of Google’s technology and infrastructure strengths:

Chronicle has a significant asset: we’re building and running it on the same fast, powerful, highly-scalable infrastructure that powers a range of other Alphabet initiatives that require enormous processing power and storage. That gives us a couple of advantages:

• We should be able to help teams search and retrieve useful information and run analysis in minutes, rather than the hours or days it currently takes.
• Storage  —  in far greater amounts and for far lower cost than organizations currently can get it  —  should help them see patterns that emerge from multiple data sources and over 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.

Gillett, former chief operating officer at security giant Symantec Corp. from late 2012 to late 2014, also said that the company has added several enterprise security experts such as Carey Nachenberg as well as 13-year Google engineering veteran Will Robinson since it started in February 2016. “We’ve also been working with a number of Fortune 500 companies who’ve provided invaluable counsel on the shape and direction of our work, and some are already testing a preview release of our new cybersecurity intelligence platform in an early alpha program,” he wrote.

Still, there’s no shortage of security companies pitching machine learning artificial intelligence early detection services. And it’s not clear why the unit wouldn’t be part of the Google Cloud Platform.

But Alphabet may have more specific plans for Chronicle, and that could be targeting Intel. Security analyst Patrick Gray put it this way on Twitter: “Google has so much data and so many amazing internal resources that my gut reaction is to think this new company could be a meteor aimed at planet Threat Intel™. But no idea yet… definitely interesting.”

No doubt Chronicle will provide more information in the future as to how it’s really any different to existing threat detection services. But with the backing of Google, whose CEO Sundar Pichai has called it an “AI-first company” and which is considered a leader in the field, it must have at least a decent shot at slicing out a share of the hypercompetitive cybersecurity market.

Photo: Chronicle