2024-07-19 16:10:30
The American company CrowdStrike, whose software caused a major breakdown on Friday, has taken advantage of the emergence of remote computing (cloud) to become, in just over a decade, a key player in cybersecurity.
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It was a software update from the group on Microsoft’s Windows operating systems that caused many computer systems, from airports to hospitals, to malfunction.
The incident highlighted the influence of little-known CrowdStrike in the digital ecosystem.
The Austin, Texas-based company is now the world’s leading player in endpoint authentication IT security.
These are programs that control access to a computer network of connected devices, such as a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
Co-founder and CEO of the group, George Kurtz explained that he wanted to focus on protection once morest intrusions rather than simply fighting viruses.
This marked a break with the historic antivirus software publishers such as Symantec and McAfee, where he was technical director until 2011, the year CrowdStrike was founded.
A report published this year by the latter estimates that 70% of attacks do not include viruses but manipulations carried out directly by “hackers”, who often use stolen or recovered identifiers.
With its flagship product, Falcon, launched in 2012, CrowdStrike also took advantage of the democratization of broadband and the proliferation of data storage centers to offer a product that relied entirely on the cloud.
Remote computing allows for rapid and regular updates.
CrowdStrike has also taken advantage of cloud acceleration and data processing capabilities to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform.
AI facilitates the detection of abnormal activity in the operation of an IT infrastructure, which may be linked to a virus or an intrusion attempt.
Identify threats
George Kurtz and the two other co-founders, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, have also taken a proactive approach to risk.
They have formed a team of several hundred people dedicated to identifying computer threats around the world, to better anticipate possible attacks.
This cell notably determined that the attack targeting the Sony Pictures film studio in 2014 originated from hackers affiliated with North Korea.
The latter had attacked Sony to dissuade it from releasing the satirical film in theaters. The interview that kills! regarding a US plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
CrowdStrike also helped establish that individuals backed by the Russian government were behind a cyberattack on Democratic Party servers during the 2016 US presidential campaign.
In 2023, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry publicly criticized Microsoft for what he saw as its failures to manage risk.
In an interview with the magazine Forbes, In particular, he criticized the technology giant for still employing hundreds of people in China.
A customer of CrowdStrike, Microsoft is also one of its competitors, as it offers its own IT protection services, just like Amazon or Google.
As of January, CrowdStrike had 7,925 employees, according to its annual report.
In 2023, the group achieved a turnover of 3.05 billion dollars, up 36% over one year.
Boosted by the wave of so-called generative AI, which requires the development of additional capacities in the cloud, CrowdStrike raised its annual forecast in June.
It is now aiming for turnover growth of between 30 and 31% this year.
Although its business is booming, the group is still struggling in terms of profitability.
In 2023, it recorded a net profit of only $89 million, its first annual profit since its inception.
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