CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike

Industry	Information security
Founded	2011
Founders	George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch
Headquarters	Irvine, California
Key people	George Kurtz, CEO Dmitri Alperovitch, CTO
Products	Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and Falcon DNS
Parent	CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.
Website	crowdstrike.com

CrowdStrike, Inc. is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Irvine, California, and a wholly owned subsidiary of CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. The company provides endpoint security, threat intelligence, and incident response services to customers in more than 170 countries.^[1][2] The company has been involved in response efforts to several high-profile cyber-attacks, including the Sony Pictures hack,^[3] the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak, and the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks. In the last case it concluded Russian state actors were responsible.^[4]

History

CrowdStrike was co-founded by entrepreneur George Kurtz (CEO),^[5][6] Dmitri Alperovitch (CTO),^[7] and Gregg Marston (CFO, retired). In 2012, Shawn Henry, a former FBI executive who led both the FBI's criminal and cyber divisions, was hired to lead sister company CrowdStrike Services, Inc., which is focused on proactive and incident response services.^[8]

The company gained recognition for providing threat intelligence and attribution to nation state actors^[9] conducting economic espionage and IP theft. This includes the outing of state-sponsored Chinese group, Putter Panda, linked to China's spying on US defense and European satellite and aerospace industries.^[10] In May 2014, supported by CrowdStrike's reports, the US Department of Justice charged five Chinese military hackers for economic cyber espionage against US corporations. Similarly, the firm is known for uncovering the activities of Koala Team | Energetic Bear, an adversary group with a nexus to the Russian Federation that conducts intelligence operations against a variety of global victims with a primary focus on the energy sector.

Following the very public Sony Pictures hack, CrowdStrike produced attribution to the government of North Korea within 48 hours and demonstrated how the attack was carried out step-by-step.^[11] On May 2015, the company released Researcher Jason Geffner's discovery of VENOM, a critical flaw in open source hypervisor called Quick Emulator (QEMU),^[12] which is used in a number of common virtualization products.

In 2014, the company launched the Falcon platform, a technology that stops breaches by combining next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, and proactive hunting. Also in 2014, CrowdStrike was instrumental in identifying members of PLA Unit 61486 as the perpetrators of a number of cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure.^[13][14]

In July 2015, Google invested in the company's Series C funding round, which in total raised $100 million. To date, CrowdStrike has achieved total funding of $256 million with estimated annual revenue of $100 million and valuation more than $1 billion.^[15] Investors include Telstra, March Capital Partners, Rackspace, Accel Partners and Warburg Pincus.^[16][17] According to the company, its customers include three of the 10 largest global companies by revenue, five of the 10 largest financial institutions, three of the top 10 health care providers, and three of the top 10 energy companies.^[18]

Crowdstrike has figured prominently in the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks and the attribution of those attacks to Russian intelligence services. On March 20, 2017 during testimony before congress, James Comey stated "Crowdstrike, Mandiant, and ThreatConnect review[ed] the evidence of the hack and conclude[d] with high certainty that it was the work of APT 28 and APT 29 who are known to be Russian intelligence services."^[19] Comey previously testified in January that a request for FBI forensics investigators to access the DNC servers was denied.^[20] Prior to this, Crowdstrike had published a report^[21] claiming that malware used in the Ukraine and against the DNC appeared to be unique and identical, further evidence for a Russian origin of the DNC attack.^[22] By March 23, CrowdStrike would scale back some of the claims about the extent of the damage caused by the malware, but stood by its core claims about Russian sources of the hacking.^[23]

Industry recognition

• Deloitte 2016 Technology Fast 500(TM) Ranking^[24]
• INC 500, 2016^[25]
• MIT Technology Review’s World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, 2013^[26]
• SC Magazine, 2016 Best Security Company Finalist, 2016^[27]
• CRN Magazine 2014 and 2015 Top Emerging Vendors^[28]
• Dark Reading’s 20 Most Disruptive Startups to Watch, 2015^[29]

References

Further reading

• The New York Times
• Network World
• Fortune (video news report)

External links

• Official website