The latest company to spin off of Alphabet’s X moonshot program hopes it can mark the spot where hackers are breaking in. The project is entering a crowded market.
Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X. The lab’s cybersecurity project, Chronicle, spun off into its own company Wednesday.
It’s not a self-driving car or a smart contact lens, but the latest project to spin off from Alphabet’s X moonshot program is still trying to solve a big technical problem.
Called Chronicle, the venture is developing technology that finds hackers faster than humans currently can. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said Wednesday that Chronicle would become its own company. The company will continue to build tools that use machine learning to identify the signs of hackers in company systems and shorten the amount of 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,” said Astro Teller, CEO of X whose alternate title is Captain of Moonshots.
Though it’s not the first company to the field, Chronicle thinks it might have an advantage, Teller said in his blog post. “Chronicle is starting by trying to give organizations a much higher-resolution view of their security situation than they’ve ever had by combining machine learning, large amounts of computing power and large amounts of storage,” he said.
