Alphabet's Chronicle has launched a product that, like Google, starts with a simple search.
It’s been a year since Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced a moonshot cybersecurity company called Chronicle. No products have arrived until now, as Alphabet’s Chronicle announces Backstory.
It’s like Google Photos but for business’ network security, says Stephen Gillett, Chronicle’s CEO. “You dump everything in Google Photos, they structure it, they recognize faces, they give you themes, they store it in the cloud and allow you to understand it,” he told Forbes.
Chronicle’s inaugural service, Backstory, does the same with business’ network data. It stores the masses of information a company has on its infrastructure—whether that’s from domain name servers or employee laptops and phones—and quickly indexes and organizes it in the cloud. Then customers carry out searches on the data, like “Are any of my computers sending data to Russian government servers?” From there, cybersecurity investigators can start asking more and more questions, such as: What kinds of information are the Russians taking, when and how?
Google quality but without the privacy problems
There’s a good amount of Google in Backstory outside of the analogy. The product was built on top of Google infrastructure, benefiting from the Mountain View giant’s epic storage and compute capacity. Two of Chronicle’s three leads—chief security officer Mike Wiacek and senior engineer Shapor Naghibzadeh—are former long-term Google security engineers. They were among the creators of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, so have a long history in hunting for cybercriminal and state-sponsored hacking activity.
And in Alphabet’s Mountain View offices, Chronicle is taking advantage of some of the best minds in next-gen tech, sitting alongside artificial intelligence trailblazers DeepMind and Google Brain, Gillett added.
Despite all its links to Google, Chronicle is keen to distance itself from the search giant. “We are distinctly not Google,” said Gillett. Backstory has separate legal and privacy agreements. That means customers won’t have to worry about Google or other partner companies mining their data or sharing it for some commercial benefit. Given all the furor around Silicon Valley’s use and abuse of data, clients will be hoping that promise is kept.
Big data security
Thanks to Chronicle’s mass of historical information from other Alphabet sources, in particular from malware repository Virus Total and Google resources, it has a good chance of pointing out whether something really is a threat or not. Backstory will continuously compare new threats against the company’s network record, notifying the user of any historical access to malicious servers or malware infections.
Backstory should be considerably quicker than other products, at the speed of a normal Google search, according to Chronicle’s calculations. The company says it will take less than a second to return results from queries, rather than as long as an hour or more for other comparable products.
In a demo for Forbes the product certainly didn’t look like Google Photos. It looks more like Google Analytics, with interactive graphs and timelines that customers can dive into to investigate any potential anomaly. It’s similarly slick and easy to navigate, even for relative neophytes.
Chronicle already has a variety of customers, from government organizations to tech and security companies, said Gillett. At the RSA Conference this week, the company is revealing a small batch of Backstory users, including truck manufacturer PACCAR; energy infrastructure giant Quanta Services; and Oscar Health, a health insurance startup.
Competitors will include anyone doing big data security. Gillett didn’t name any specific companies, but think of market leaders like Splunk or RSA. To take those folks on, the Alphabet company is also going aggressive on pricing. Rather than linking costs to the amount of data used like other cloud services, the product will be charged depending on the size of the company. (No figures were provided by Chronicle, however).
In the future, Chronicle will look to take beneficial actions based on all that information and to automate protective measures on behalf of the user. So when those Russian spies, digital gangsters and bottom-feeder cybercriminals already have network access and are mining data, Chronicle will cut them off before IT has to lift a finger.
