All About the Cybersecurity Giant Behind Global IT Outage

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is a leader in its industry, known for building software defenses for the cloud computing era and exposing Russian and North Korean threats.

Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston.

Both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive cybersecurity experience, working at companies like McAfee.

Two years after its founding, CrowdStrike launched its signature product, the Falcon platform.

– Best player –

Crucially, the company has adopted a “cloud-first” model to reduce customers’ large computing needs and provide more effective protection.

Rather than focusing solely on malware and antivirus products, the founders wanted to shift attention to identifying and stopping the attackers and their techniques themselves.

“CrowdStrike is one of the best-known cybersecurity companies,” said Michael Daniel, who worked as a White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Barack Obama administration.

“It typically provides what we think of as a kind of endpoint protection, meaning it actually has software running on a server or on a specific device like a laptop or desktop, and it’s checking for potential malware connections to domain names invalid.” he said.

“He’s looking for behavior that might be unusual, that kind of thing,” said Daniel, who now runs the Cyber ​​Threat Alliance.

The company’s share price fell about 9% in morning trading on Wall Street.

CrowdStrike became a publicly traded company in 2019 and the company’s total revenue last quarter was $921 million, with projections of raising around $4 billion in the current fiscal year.

The company’s main competitor is Palo Alto Networks and also SentinelOne, which are independent cybersecurity companies.

Cloud computing giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google also provide their own cybersecurity software and are rivals.

– North Korea Hack –

But CrowdStrike is also a cyber intelligence company and made headlines when it was involved in investigating several high-profile cyber attacks.

Most famously, in 2014, CrowdStrike uncovered evidence linking North Korean actors to the hacking of Sony Pictures servers.

Hackers stole large amounts of data and threatened terrorist acts against movie theaters to prevent the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about the leader of North Korea.

The studio initially canceled the film’s theatrical release, but reversed its decision after criticism.

Sony estimated the direct costs of the hack at around $35 million to investigate and remediate the breach.

CrowdStrike also helped investigate the 2015-2016 cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States and its connection to Russian intelligence services.

In December 2016, CrowdStrike released a report stating that a Russian government-affiliated group called Fancy Bear had hacked a Ukrainian artillery application, potentially causing significant losses to Ukrainian artillery units.

However, this assessment was later disputed by some organizations and CrowdStrike reversed some of the claims.

– Criticism of Microsoft –

In recent months, CrowdStike has criticized Microsoft for its cybersecurity failures, as the Windows maker has admitted to vulnerabilities and intrusions by external actors.

Among other criticisms, CrowdStrike criticized Microsoft for still doing business in China.

“You’re telling the public that they can’t use Huawei and that they can’t allow children to watch dance videos on TikTok because China will collect intelligence,” said Shawn Henry, chief security officer at CrowdStrike last year.

“Yet the most ubiquitous software, which is used in every government and every company in this country and around the world, has engineers in China working on its software,” Henry told Forbes.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)