Bratislava-based security firm ESET has teamed up with Alphabet’s new cybersecurity spinoff Chronicle, becoming the third endpoint protection specialist to partner with the company and feed threat data into Chronicle’s Backstory offering.
ESET joins Avast and Proofpoint as an early “Insight Partner” – providing Backstory with a range of material including data from its DNS servers and firewalls.
Backstory, which launched in March 2019, is a Google Cloud-based service that lets companies upload, store, and analyse their internal security telemetry to detect and investigate potential cyber threats, by running Chronicle’s analytics engine over high-volume data such as DNS traffic, netflow, endpoint logs, proxy logs, etc.
The “infinitely elastic” browser-based threat analysis application is essentially a “Google” of threat data, which Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett described on launch as “comparing your network activity against a continuous stream of threat intelligence signals, curated from a variety of sources, to detect potential threats instantly.”
What’s in it for ESET?
With a 110 million-strong user base across 200+ countries, ESET can mine a rich set of threat data. The company also boasts almost 40 percent of its workforce working in R&D. The company declined to disclose details of the partnership, however, including whether Chronicle was paying for the data and precisely what data it was getting.
In a short call with Computer Business Review, when asked what ESET got out of the agreement, ESET’s Tony Anscombe, global security evangelist and industry ambassador, said: “The agreement lets them surface threat data from ESET. We’re also providing them some additional data on top of that.” (He declined to offer more details).
Anscombe added: “We’re looking at future opportunities with regard to what’s possible in terms of integrations, but ultimately this is a case of us all pulling in the same direction: no one company can provide all the security a company needs.”
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Ansh Patnaik, Chief Product Officer, Chronicle, said: “As a global platform designed to analyze enterprise security telemetry, Backstory provides more value to customers when it’s integrated with other key technologies within the customers’ networks. We believe our collaboration with ESET gives customers a broader, more accurate view of threats within their networks.”
“Our partnership with Chronicle will lead to simpler, faster and more streamlined remediation of advanced persistent cyber threats,” Anscombe added. “Together, customers will be able to quickly understand incidents in more detail, take the appropriate actions and stay one step ahead of bad actors.”
It’s an approach echoed by Avast, one of Chronicle’s inaugural partners, which described the relationship at the time as “
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