On 19 July 2024, about 8.5 million Windows computers crashed and would not restart. Airlines grounded planes, hospitals and banks scrambled. The cause was a faulty configuration update from CrowdStrike, a company that sells protection. George Kurtz, its chief executive, apologised publicly. It was not a cyberattack, the company said. It was its own mistake.
Kurtz did not start out as a hacker's hero. He grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey, played football for his high school, and fished. He says he started programming games on a Commodore in fourth grade. In college he studied accounting at Seton Hall and began as a CPA at Price Waterhouse. In 1993 the firm opened a security division, and he moved into penetration testing, which meant being paid to break into clients' systems.
He grew up in Parsippany, New Jersey, played football for his high school, and fished.
In 1999 he co-wrote Hacking Exposed, a book that has sold more than 600,000 copies, and started Foundstone. McAfee bought it in 2004 and eventually made him chief technology officer. Then Intel bought McAfee in 2011, and he left.
He landed at Warburg Pincus as an entrepreneur-in-residence and began working on a different idea: protect machines from the cloud, rather than shipping heavy software to each one. Warburg put in $25 million. His partners were Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, the founding finance chief.
Alperovitch's route was stranger. Born in Moscow in 1980, he left at 13. The family reached Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his father, a nuclear physicist, took a job. While still in high school, father and son started an encryption business. He studied computer science at Georgia Tech, did the school's first graduate degree in information security, and at the email-security firm CipherTrust helped invent TrustedSource, a system that scored senders' reputations, before running threat research at McAfee. He left CrowdStrike in 2020.
The product, Falcon, launched in June 2013. But what made the name was attribution. CrowdStrike's reports helped the US Justice Department charge five Chinese military hackers in 2014 and linked North Korea to the Sony hack. The 2016 investigation of the Democratic National Committee put it in front of Congress. There were also stumbles. A December 2016 report on a Ukrainian artillery app was disputed by a UK think tank and by Ukraine's own defence ministry.
Google invested in 2015. The company went public on Nasdaq on 12 June 2019, priced at $34 against an expected $28 to $30, and opened at $63.50 for a raise of roughly $612 million. It joined the S&P 500 in 2024. Then came July 2024, and Delta later sued for roughly half a billion dollars. Even so, in the year ended January 2026 revenue was about $4.81 billion, with a market value of about $222 billion on 6 November 2026.
The lesson is double-edged. Kurtz built trust by being right about other people's failures in public, and then had to earn it back after his own. A security company's brand is a promise it can lose in a single afternoon.