Google parent company forms Chronicle security company

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has set up a new security company. It will be named Chronicle and originated from X, Alphabet’s business unit for experimental projects.

Astro Teller, head of the X division, writes in a blog that his division secretly started a project in early 2016 that focuses on digital security. That experiment has now resulted in the establishment of the Chronicle company, which operates independently under the Alphabet flag. VirusTotal, acquired by Google in 2012, will also be housed at Chronicle.

Teller argues that security companies are currently particularly reactive when it comes to digital attacks. If there is damage, the cause is found and repairs are made, but the goal, according to Chronicle, should be to predict the attacks and avert them.

According to Teller, predicting and repelling digital attacks is not yet feasible in the coming years, but Chronicle wants to make a start by giving companies a much more detailed picture of their security situation than they have now. Chronicle says it does that with “a combination of machine learning, large amounts of computing power and large amounts of storage.” This should make patterns visible and, for example, shorten the time between the start of an attack and its discovery.

On its website, Chronicle speaks of planet-scale computing and analytics. Stephen Gillet is the CEO and co-founder of Chronicle. He comes from Google, but previously served as chief operations officer at Symantec.