Alphabet—the parent company of Google, Nest, Waymo, and a million other companies—is launching a new company under the Alphabet umbrella. It’s called “Chronicle,” and the new company wants to apply the usual Google tenets of machine learning and cloud computing to cybersecurity. Terry Ray, CTO at Imperva commented below.
Terry Ray, CTO at Imperva:
“The announcements today by Amazon Web Services and Alphabet/Google are encouraging and demonstrate that more and more, cyber security is at the forefront of corporate agendas. Both of these technologies will likely serve as analytic platforms for threat detection, which isn’t necessarily a new idea, though I’m sure they’ll have their differentiators.
Their pitch seems to point toward the idea of forwarding all types of collected security logs to these new systems, similar to analytic platforms already on the market. Then letting them churn through the data to find the needle in the needle stack. While this sounds promising, the reality of many of these general purpose analyze everything systems is that they require considerable user interaction, services and most importantly expertise.
Maybe they are hoping AI will do all the work, possibly, but I think we are a long way from that. Humans will be needed at least in the reasonably near term and according to Cybersecurity Ventures 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will be unfilled by 2021, hiring qualified engineers for advanced analytics is likely to be very difficult.
What I’ve seen more frequently is collection of log data then focused preprocessing of that data, transforming it from raw logs to actionable evidence and eliminating non-security events. Then those results are used effectively within general purpose threat detection, since the preprocessing effort effectively reduced the expertise needed at the aggregate all data layer.”
