CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is a pioneer in its field, known for building software security for the cloud computing era and exposing Russian and North Korean threats.
The Austin, Texas-based company was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitry Alperovitch, and Greg Marston.
Both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive backgrounds in cybersecurity, and had worked at companies such as McAfee.
Two years after its founding, CrowdStrike launched its signature product, the Falcon platform.
– top player –
Importantly, the company adopted a “cloud-first” model to reduce customers’ large computing needs and provide more effective security.
Instead of focusing only on malware and antivirus products, the founders wanted to focus on identifying and stopping attackers and their techniques.
“CrowdStrike is one of the best-known cybersecurity companies,” said Michael Daniel, who served as White House cybersecurity coordinator during Barack Obama’s administration.
“It typically provides a type of endpoint security, which means it has software actually running on a server or on a particular device, like a laptop or desktop, and it scans for potentially malware connections with spoofed domain names,” he said.
“It’s looking for behavior that might be unusual, things like that,” said Daniels, who now runs the Cyber Threat Alliance.
The company’s stock price fell nearly 9 percent in morning trading on Wall Street.
CrowdStrike became a publicly traded company in 2019, and the company’s total revenue in the last quarter was $921 million, while the current fiscal year is estimated at around $4 billion.
The company’s main competitors are Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne, which are independent cybersecurity firms.
Cloud computing giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google also offer their own cybersecurity software and are rivals of one another.
– North Korea Hacked –
But CrowdStrike is also a cyber intelligence company and made headlines for its involvement in the investigation of several high-profile cyber attacks.
Most famously, in 2014, CrowdStrike discovered evidence of North Korean actors hacking Sony Pictures’ servers.
Hackers stole a huge amount of data and threatened a terrorist attack on cinemas to prevent the release of the comedy film “The Interview” about the North Korean leader.
The studio initially cancelled the film’s theatrical release but changed its decision after receiving criticism.
Sony has estimated that the direct costs for investigating and remediating the hack will be approximately $35 million.
CrowdStrike also helped investigate the 2015–2016 cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States and their 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 app, which had the potential to cause significant damage to Ukrainian artillery units.
However, this assessment was later disputed by some organizations and CrowdStrike retracted some of the claims.
– Criticism of Microsoft –
In recent months, CrowdStrike has criticized Microsoft for lapses on cybersecurity, as the Windows maker has acknowledged vulnerabilities and hacking by outside elements.
Among other criticisms, CrowdStrike criticized Microsoft for still doing business in China.
“You’re telling the public they can’t use Huawei, and they can’t let kids watch dance videos on TikTok, because China is going to collect intelligence,” Shawn Henry, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer, said last year.
“Yet the most ubiquitous software, used by governments and every corporation in this country and around the world, has engineers working on it in China,” Henry told Forbes.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
