http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/crowdstrike-cybersecurity-george-kurtz/
By Robert Hackett
@rhhackett
Fortune.com
July 29, 2015
It’s not every day that a company can compel hackers to give up. Yet
that’s exactly what CrowdStrike managed to do earlier this year.
CEO and co-founder George Kurtz tells it like this: A besieged customer
needed backup. So Kurtz’s team sent in reinforcements, placed its
cloud-based software sensors across the breached business’s computing
environment, and started gathering intel. Aha! Investigators spotted
Hurricane Panda, an old Chinese nemesis that Kurtz’s crew had been
battling since 2013. What happened next surprised them: When the attackers
scanned an infected machine only to find traces of CrowdStrike, they fled.
CrowdStrike’s reputation precedes it. The company, founded in 2011 and
based in Irvine, Calif., has gone toe-to-toe with some of the world’s most
sophisticated state-sponsored hacking groups. The firm analyzed the data
behind the breaches of millions of sensitive records at the Office of
Personnel Management, the federal agency responsible for human resources,
in what may have been the biggest act of cyberespionage the U.S. has ever
seen. It has published threat reports on many of the more than 50
adversaries it tracks, which include the likes of Ghost Jackal (the Syrian
Electronic Army), Viceroy Tiger (an Indian intruder), and Andromeda Spider
(a criminal coterie). Between 2013 and 2014 its revenue grew 142% and its
customer base more than tripled, two reasons Google Capital GOOG 0.63% ,
the tech giant’s growth equity arm, led a $100 million investment in
CrowdStrike in July, its first ever for a computer security company.
Kurtz used to travel hundreds of thousands of miles a year as CTO of
McAfee, now called Intel Security INTC 0.17% , to meet with beleaguered
customers. It struck him that they did not need more anti-malware and
antivirus products, the traditional realm of information security, so much
as software oriented toward tradecraft and technique, the domain of
cyberspies. Co-founder and CTO Dmitri Alperovitch, then McAfee’s head of
threat intelligence, agreed.
[...]
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