What is CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity giant behind the global IT outage?

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is the leader in its sector, known for building software defences for the cloud computing age and exposing Russian and North Korean 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.

Crucially, the company embraced a “cloud-first” model to reduce big computing needs on customers and provide more effective protection.

In particular, remote computing enables updates to be carried out quickly and regularly, something that failed spectacularly in Friday’s outage when an update proved incompatible with computers running on Microsoft software.

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Airports across the world see operations disrupted as Microsoft systems outage hits globally

Airports across the world see operations disrupted as Microsoft systems outage hits globally

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.