Alphabet’s Chronicle launches ‘Backstory’ for business network security management

Alphabet’s ‘Chronicle’, launched last year, announced its first product, ‘Backstory’ at the ongoing RSA 2019. Backstory is a security data platform and stores huge amounts of business’ network data--including information from domain name servers to employee laptops and phones--into a Chronicle-installed collection of servers on a customer’s premises. This data is quickly indexed and organized.

According to Forbes, customers can then carry out searches on the data, like “Are any of my computers sending data to Russian government servers?” Cybersecurity investigators can start asking questions such as: What kinds of information are the Russians taking, when and how?. This method of working is very similar to Google Photos.

Backstory gives security analysts the ability to quickly understand the real vulnerabilities. According to the Backstory blog, “Backstory is a global security telemetry platform for investigation and threat hunting within your enterprise network. It is a specialized, cloud-native security analytics system, built on the core infrastructure that powers Google itself. Making security analytics instant, easy, and cost-effective.” The company states that this service requires zero customer hardware, maintenance, tuning, or ongoing management and can support security analytics against the largest customer networks with ease.

Features of Backstory

Backstory provides a real-time and retroactive instant indicator matching across all logs. It checks failure points such as if a domain flips from good to bad, Backstory shows all devices that have ever communicated with that domain).