This isn’t the regular weekly show, Soap Box is the podcast where vendors pay to appear to talk about big picture stuff, or really anything they want.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately you’d know that Google’s parent company Alphabet announced the spinoff of an enterprise information security company. They’ve named it Chronicle, but beyond that it’s all a bit mysterious. Unlike other startups that stay super stealth until they launch their product, Alphabet basically realised that as it already has its platform out there under beta test with a bunch of organisations the creation of the company would eventually leak, and that would have been a mess from Alphabet’s point of view. So, their solution was to announce the company before it’s ready to ship its product.

I would love to tell you that they’re going to drop all the juicy details in this podcast but they’re not. They’ll drop some hints, but for now, Chronicle’s mystery platform will remain that: a mystery.

But that’s not to say there isn’t some other stuff to talk about. As a part of the spinoff, Virus Total is now a part of Chronicle. And you know what? There’s a lot more to Virus Total, in particular Virus Total Intelligence, than I realised. That’s partly because Alphabet hasn’t really done much marketing around it, and this is a kind of first step down that path.

So in this podcast you’re going to hear from two people from Chronicle – Rick Caccia who is the chief marketing officer, he’s mostly chiming in to explain a little bit about the new company – and Mike Wiacek, the CSO and co-founder of Chronicle. He’s going to be telling us about all the features of Virus Total that you probably didn’t realise exist. Did you know if you have a VTI account you can run YARA rules against everything that comes in to Virus Total? And you can apply the rules retrospectively to see what shakes out? And that they have graph and clustering features? And … and … and … you get the idea.

I hope you enjoy this podcast!