All about the cybersecurity giant behind the global IT outage

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

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

Both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive experience in cybersecurity, having worked at companies such as McAfee.

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

– Best player –

Essentially, the company 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 the focus to identifying and stopping the attackers themselves and their techniques.

“CrowdStrike is one of the most well-known cybersecurity companies,” said Michael Daniel, who served as White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Obama administration.

“It provides what we think of as a kind of endpoint protection, meaning you actually have software running on a server or on a particular device, like a laptop or desktop, and it scans for potential malware connections to malicious domain names,” he said.

“You’re looking for behaviors that might be unusual, that kind of thing,” said Daniel, who now heads the Cyber Threat Alliance.

The company’s stock price fell about 9 percent in morning trading on Wall Street.

CrowdStrike became a public company in 2019 and the company’s total revenue in the most recent quarter was $921 million with projections to generate around $4 billion in the current fiscal year.

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

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

– North Korea Hacking –

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

The most famous case was in 2014, when CrowdStrike uncovered evidence linking North Korean actors to the hacking of Sony Pictures servers.

Hackers stole vast amounts of data and threatened to attack movie theaters to prevent the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about North Korea’s leader.

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

Sony estimated the direct costs of the attack were 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 published a report claiming that a Russian government-affiliated group called Fancy Bear had hacked a Ukrainian artillery app, potentially causing significant losses to Ukrainian artillery units.

However, this assessment was later questioned by some organizations and CrowdStrike retracted some of the claims.

– Criticism of Microsoft –

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

Among other criticisms, CrowdStrike criticized Microsoft for continuing to do business in China.

“They’re telling the public that they can’t use Huawei and they can’t let kids watch dance videos on TikTok because China is going to collect data,” said Shawn Henry, chief security officer at CrowdStrike, last year.

“Yet the most ubiquitous software, used across the government and every corporation 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.)