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George Kurtz spent more than a decade building CrowdStrike into a giant that helps prevent large-scale breaches of computer systems. Now, the company he co-founded has caused the massive global outage it was supposed to prevent.

Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike is a popular company in corporate America that provides cyberattack protection software to tens of thousands of customers, including 300 of the Fortune 500. Security experts say that because cybersecurity software like CrowdStrike can access the most basic elements of a computer's operating system to protect against cyberattacks, the scale of downtime it causes is even greater.

Crowdstrike, based in Austin, Texas, initially positioned itself as a more flexible and intelligent technology that could prevent hackers from breaking into corporate computers. The security industry called it the next generation of antivirus technology. Kurtz and Crowdstrike's other co-founder, Dmitry Alperovich, worked together at antivirus giant McAfee, where they perfected the marketing of their security products by exposing global hacking activities.

Kurtz, Alperovich and Greg Marston, a third CrowdStrike co-founder, decided to develop products focused on hacking. They sold their software to large companies and government agencies that were frustrated by existing security products, such as those from McAfee.

In addition to selling Falcon security software, CrowdStrike is also in the business of responding to cyber incidents. It was invited to investigate the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Over the years, CrowdStrike has become known for its cutting-edge research into criminal and state-sponsored hacking activities.

In the fierce competition among the new generation of antivirus software companies, Zhongji has won a great victory. According to data from industry research firm Gartner, Zhongji has a market value of about $73 billion and occupies nearly 15% of the global security software market.

Crowdstrike has more than 8,000 employees and went public in 2019. At the close of trading on the 18th, the company's stock price was about 10 times its initial public offering price of $34 per share. It was included in the S&P 500 index last month. After the news of the outage on the 19th, the company's stock price fell 11%.

【News link】Massive outage affects 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices worldwide

The impact of the global outage of Microsoft Windows system caused by the release of software updates by the US security technology company "Crowdstrike" is still continuing. Microsoft announced on the 20th that the global technical failure has affected 8.5 million devices using the Windows operating system.

Microsoft's official blog released a statement that day, saying that it is estimated that the incident affected 8.5 million Windows devices, accounting for less than 1% of all Windows devices. Although the proportion is small, the wide-ranging economic and social impact reflects that companies using Crowdstrike's software provide services in many key areas.

On the 19th, Microsoft Windows system and some other Microsoft applications and services experienced large-scale outages, causing many countries' aviation, railways, shipping, finance, medical, hotel and other industries to be unable to operate normally, and the work and life of many companies and individual users were seriously disrupted.

Microsoft said that although software updates may occasionally cause problems, failures with such a wide impact as the "CrowdHit" incident are not common. This incident highlights the interdependence of the entire huge ecosystem, including global cloud service providers, software platforms, security and other software vendors, and customers. "This also reminds all participants in the entire technology ecosystem how important it is to prioritize security deployment and disaster recovery using existing mechanisms."

Microsoft said it has dispatched hundreds of engineers and experts to directly contact customers to respond to the incident and eliminate the cause of the failure. Microsoft is in continuous dialogue with other cloud service providers such as Amazon and Google, as well as CrowdStrike, to jointly focus on the subsequent impact of the incident.

According to media reports, as of the 20th, the order of airports affected by the incident in the United States, Germany, France, South Korea, Thailand, India and other countries has been basically restored, but some companies are still dealing with the aftermath. The German Federal Information Security Agency said on the 20th that many companies are struggling to deal with the aftermath of the incident. England's National Health Service also issued a warning that although the medical system affected by the incident has returned to normal in most areas, services in some parts of the UK may still be interrupted in the next week, especially in terms of general practitioner services. (Xinhua News Agency)

Column Editor: Qin Hong Text Editor: Cheng Pei Title Image Source: IC PHOTO Image Editor: Xu Jiamin

Source: Author: Reference News