Alphabet unit Chronicle rolls out enterprise cybersecurity product

Alphabet Inc. unit Chronicle has launched a cybersecurity product called Backstory to help enterprises secure their networks as they move into a higher compute and storage platform.

Chronicle said in a blog post that the same technology is being used for protecting Google’s own infrastructure and data. Google parent Alphabet had launched Chronicle a year ago to focus entirely on enterprise cybersecurity, with many Google employees moving to the new unit.

Backstory lets companies privately upload, store and analyse their internal security telemetry, including high-volume data such as domain name system traffic, endpoint logs and proxy logs, while investigating potential cyber threats.

“We believe the power of the security community is our best defense against aggressive and determined attackers. We combine these experiences of Google and the industry to deliver new solutions to a significant problem,” the company said in the blog post.

Backstory compares the enterprise's network activity against a continuous stream of threat intelligence signals, curated from a variety of sources, to detect potential threats instantly, Chronicle said. It added that the product can also continuously compare any new piece of information against the enterprise's historical activity, to notify any historical access to known-bad web domains, malware-infected files, and other threats.

The subsidiary was established with a view to leverage Google's resources and experience to come out with new cybersecurity tools, perspectives and abilities to take on competition.

The specific capabilities include global threat intelligence via VirusTotal, a unified dashboard called Nirvana that ties multiple tools together and Threat Analysis Group (TAG), a team of threat analysis experts who make sense of the information, Chronicle said. It added that these capabilities were earlier only available for Google and are now being offered to other companies as well.

Chronicle was founded by Mike Wiacek and Stephen Gillett, former chief information officer at coffee retail chain Starbucks. They together founded Google's TAG.