What is Crowdstrike?Published at 10:34
Tom Gerken
BBC News
The cause of the IT outage, which is affecting businesses around the world, is still unknown.
However, earlier today, American Airlines cited a “technical issue with CrowdStrike” as the cause, and now the Swiss Cybersecurity Agency has also pointed the finger at them (see previous post).
Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company founded in 2011 with the goal of protecting the world’s largest businesses and hardware from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.
It specializes in endpoint security protection, preventing malicious software and files from entering a corporate network from devices that connect to the network, such as phones and laptops.
It also aims to protect the data of companies that have moved from protecting it under their own roofs or on their own servers to so-called cloud providers.
The Texas-based company was co-founded by entrepreneurs George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovich, who remains its chief executive officer, and went public on the tech-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange in 2019.
Since its inception, the company appears to have played a key role in helping companies investigate cyber attacks.
In 2016, CrowdStrike was hired by the Democratic National Committee, the party’s strategic arm, to investigate intrusions into its computer network.
