- George Kurtz, CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday that the company is targeting “adversarial AI” — adversaries that use generative AI techniques for malicious reasons. He said he was ready to fight.
- CrowdStrike shares fell in after-hours trading on Wednesday, despite the company reporting earnings that beat consensus expectations.
George Kurtz, CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Thursday that the company uses AI technology to hack systems for nefarious purposes. He said he was ready to take on opponents, often outside the country.
Kurtz stressed that the company has been working to combat these enemies for some time and that their intelligence and strength should not be underestimated.
“National adversaries are using the same technology — generative AI and others — to try to break the system,” he said. “So this is one of the areas where we need the best AI, and we need the best datasets. We need this kind of human-annotated information to be able to train generative AI algorithms. I think there is, but yeah – it’s an arms race and we think we’re well positioned.”
CrowdStrike, a U.S. Department of Defense contractor, announced Wednesday that it has been granted an Impact Level 5 (IL5) security clearance. This will give the company access to sensitive information for some highly sensitive cybersecurity materials. This facilitates “up to millions more endpoints and workloads,” Kurz said. Kurtz also argued that CrowdStrike’s new technology could stop breaches more effectively than the legacy-based products Microsoft uses.
”[Microsoft’s] The underlying endpoint technology is still legacy, signature-based, and updated 6-7 times a day. That’s why I started CrowdStrike,” said Kurtz. Traditional technologies have been unable to stop the breach, he said, adding that much of the incident response work is for Microsoft customers.
CrowdStrike’s shares fell more than 11% in after-hours trading, despite reporting strong earnings on Wednesday. The company posted revenue of $692.6 million, well above consensus expectations of $677 million.
