Today's Edition
Washington (AFP)
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is a leader in its sector, known for building software defenses for the cloud computing age and exposing 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 backgrounds in cybersecurity, working at companies like McAfee.
Two years after its founding, CrowdStrike launched its signature product, the Falcon platform.
Top player
Crucially, the company embraced a "cloud-first" model to reduce big computing needs on customers and provide more effective protection.
Rather than just focusing on malware and antivirus products, the founders wanted to shift attention to identifying and stopping the attackers themselves and their techniques.
"CrowdStrike is one of the best known cybersecurity companies around," said Michael Daniel, who worked as the White House cybersecurity coordinator during Barack Obama's administration.
"It provides typically what we think of as sort of endpoint protection, meaning that it's actually got software running on a server, or on a particular device, like a laptop or a desktop and it's scanning for potential malware connections to bad domain names," he said.
Share price down
The company's share price was down by about 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 with projections of bringing in about $4 billion in the current fiscal year.
Cloud computing giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google also provide their own cybersecurity software and are rivals.
Most famously, in 2014, CrowdStrike discovered evidence linking North Korean actors to the hack of servers at Sony Pictures.
CrowdStrike also helped investigate the 2015-2016 cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States.
Criticism of Microsoft
In recent months, CrowdStike has criticised Microsoft for its lapses on cyber security as the Windows maker admitted to vulnerabilities and hackings by outside actors.
