CrowdStrike and the Global IT Outage: What You Need to Know

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company responsible for a massive global IT outage, is a leader in its field and is known for building software defenses for the cloud computing age and exposing Russian and North Korean threats. In recent months, CrowdStike has criticized Microsoft for its lapses on cyber security as the maker of Windows acknowledged vulnerabilities and hackings by an outside actor.The company was established in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston and has its headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Working for companies like McAfee, both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive cybersecurity experience. The Falcon platform, CrowdStrike's flagship product, was introduced two years after the company was founded. Importantly, the company adopted a "cloud-first" business model to reduce customers' large computing requirements and improve security.

The founders wanted to focus on identifying and stopping the attackers themselves and their methods rather than just malware and antivirus products.

Michael Daniel, who served as the White House cybersecurity coordinator under President Barack Obama, stated, "CrowdStrike is one of the best known cybersecurity companies around."

He stated, "It typically provides what we think of as sort of endpoint protection, which is that it actually has software running on a server or on a specific device, such as a laptop or desktop, and it's scanning for potential malware connections to bad domain names."

Daniel, who is currently in charge of the Cyber Threat Alliance, stated, "It's looking for behavior that might be unusual, such as things like that."

In the early morning hours of Wall Street trading, the price of the company's shares was down about 9%.

In 2019, CrowdStrike became a publicly traded company. The company made $921 million in revenue in the most recent quarter, and it expects to make about $4 billion this fiscal year.

Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne, both independent cybersecurity companies, are the company's main rivals. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, all titans of cloud computing, compete with one another by providing their own cybersecurity software. North Korea hack - CrowdStrike, a cyber intelligence company, made news when it investigated a number of high-profile cyberattacks. Most well-knownly, in 2014, CrowdStrike discovered evidence linking actors from North Korea to the Sony Pictures server hack.

In order to prevent the release of "The Interview," a comedy about the leader of North Korea, the hackers stole a significant amount of data and threatened terrorist acts against movie theaters.

The movie's theatrical release was initially canceled by the studio, but after receiving criticism, the studio changed its mind. Sony estimated that the breach's investigation and remediation would cost approximately $35 million directly.

Additionally, CrowdStrike assisted in the investigation of the connection between the 2015-2016 cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States and Russian intelligence services. A CrowdStrike report from December 2016 stated that Fancy Bear, a Russian government-affiliated group, had hacked a Ukrainian artillery app, potentially resulting in significant losses for Ukrainian artillery units. However, some organizations later refuted this assessment, and CrowdStrike reversed some of the claims.

Criticism of Microsoft: In recent months, CrowdStike has criticized Microsoft for its cyber security flaws, as the maker of Windows has acknowledged vulnerabilities and outside hacking.

CrowdStrike criticized Microsoft for continuing to conduct business in China, among other things.

Shawn Henry, CrowdStrike's chief security officer, stated last year, "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."

Henry stated to Forbes, "Yet the most ubiquitous software, which is used by the government and every corporation in this country and around the world, has engineers working on their software in China."

Source - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/crowdstrike-all-about-the-cybersecurity-giant-behind-global-it-outage-6145685