Alphabet's "X," the research and development team founded by Google to develop solutions that address global issues, wants to help security teams prevent cyber attacks before they have to deal with the repercussions.
X prides itself in addressing large-scale problems like traffic safety by creating new technologies that do more than just building off of existing tools. Now, it's taking on cybercrime as its next mission with a new independent company called Chronicle, which CEO Stephen Gillett announced via a Medium post on Wednesday morning.
"The reality for most companies today when it comes to cybersecurity is reactive: find and clean up the damage. The real moonshot, which is still several years away, is predicting and deflecting cyber attacks before they infiltrate an organization’s network," Astro Teller, leader of X, said in a separate Medium post.
Gillett's announcement went into detail about how Chronicle intends to make that moonshot a reality.
"X, the moonshot factory, has been our home for the last two years while we figured out where we had the potential to make the biggest impact on this enormous problem. Now we’re ready to unveil our new company, which will have two parts: a new cybersecurity intelligence and analytics platform that we hope can help enterprises better manage and understand their own security-related data; and VirusTotal, a malware intelligence service acquired by Google in 2012 which will continue to operate as it has for the last few years."
The platform's search and machine-learning capabilities are intended to dwindle down the thousands of digital security threats that are currently flagged because of all the tools being used for detection. Instead, companies will have a clearer understanding of the current state of security.
Plus, the platform will reduce times and costs since it's being built on the same infrastructure that allows Alphabet's other projects the amount of storage and processing power they require.
According to Gillett's Medium post, the project is moving forward quickly. Chronicle is already hiring, and companies are using the platform as early testers to provide feedback.
"We hope that by making this mix of technologies available to more companies at affordable prices, we can give 'the good guys' an advantage and help us all turn the tide against cybercrime."
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