Alphabet daughter Chronicle comes with corporate malware search service

Chronicle, one of Alphabet’s subsidiaries, is coming up with new security software. The company today unveiled a platform specifically designed to detect malware within business networks. The platform is called VirusTotal Enterprise and is available immediately.

Last January, Alphabet founded Chronicle. Today it launches a product based on the technology that also uses the search giant Google. Alphabet acquired VirusTotal in 2012 from a Spanish security company that had developed it as a free service for security experts. Now it’s a new business product.

Scan suspicious files

VirusTotal provides the ability to view and check suspicious files against a database of billions of known malware signatures. The tool performs checks using more than one hundred scanning engines, as well as a long list of public datasets on cyber threats. VirusTotal Enterprise further expands the free version with capabilities that companies can apply to their internal infrastructure.

One of the main additions lies in the Private Graph. This is an enhanced version of VirusTotal Graph, a paid visualization service that helps security experts detect patterns in malware infections. Companies can improve those visualizations with data around their infrastructure, employees, business structure and certain company-specific details. Chronicle states that the Private Graph automatically knows certain characteristics of hacks.

Free and paid variant

Apart from the Private Graph, Chronicle also brings out a new search engine that helps to search for data about specific malware. VirusTotal Enterprise allows professionals to set a lot of different parameters in that search. A user may choose to use an icon of a malware application and search for it.

Many of Chronicle’s services are available in both free and paid versions. This applies to the Private Graph, but also to the search engine. Both offer a lot of extra possibilities in the paid version, such as faster and wider searches. The platform is not cheap: it is said to cost $10,000 per year.