Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is CrowdStrike?

Cyber security threats are rising. That's the warning from Luke Francis, ANZ Channel Director at CrowdStrike, a global leader in endpoint protection, who recently spoke about the company's evolving role in the region and the shifting cyber landscape.

CrowdStrike, known for specialising in cloud-based endpoint protection, has one key goal: to stop breaches before they happen. As Francis explained, "Our product was built from the ground up to stop corporate breaches." Their flagship product, Falcon, is an endpoint protection platform designed as a modular offering, allowing customers to address a wide range of security challenges.

"Falcon was designed as a modular offering that addresses a number of security challenges and use cases, the most notable of which include next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, and managed threat hunting," Francis said. He further noted that as an "extensible application platform", new and existing use cases are supported through additional modules. These range from asset discovery and vulnerability management to device control, firewall management and, most recently, cloud security modules.

A key technical differentiator, he highlighted, is Falcon's use of a single lightweight agent that leverages cloud-scale AI to provide real-time protection and visibility across organisations. "It correlates over three trillion endpoint-related events per week in real time from across the globe, fueling one of the world's most advanced data platforms for security," Francis said.

CrowdStrike has expanded its platform to embrace more technology providers through what it calls the CrowdStrike Store. "The CrowdStrike Store allows technology partners to leverage CrowdStrike's cloud architecture to build, test and ultimately deploy their products across both existing CrowdStrike customer instances and new ones as well," he explained. This approach, according to Francis, is "really driving innovation in the security market".

Within Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), CrowdStrike's presence has grown considerably. "We are a little north of 100 people in-country now, so we have sales people spread across Australia and New Zealand," Francis said. He outlined the local business infrastructure, which includes business unit functions such as HR and legal, and a network of approximately 50 channel partners across the region – about 35 in Australia and 15 in New Zealand. Global and local partners are divided into "associate, focus and elite" tiers, forming what Francis describes as "an extension of our own sales force".

One area that has seen an uptick in criminal activity is manufacturing, according to findings from the recently released CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch 2023 hunting report. "E-crime activity has again for the second year outpaced state-sponsored activity, representing about 82 percent of all intrusions," Francis noted. The first half of 2020 saw a significant escalation in cyber attacks against the manufacturing sector, making it the second most targeted area monitored by CrowdStrike's OverWatch team, behind only the technology sector.

Hands-on-keyboard intrusion activity for the first half of this year has already surpassed that of 2019, an outcome that Francis ties to the widespread shift to remote work. "It demonstrates how the shift to remote working has expanded the attack surface for adversaries and really created further opportunities for exploitation," he said.

Nation-state activity also remains a threat. "The OverWatch team observed that there were six different Chinese-based actors that were active in our region, likely motivated by espionage and data theft, and conducting campaigns that were increasingly aimed at telecommunications companies," Francis outlined. The report's findings, he said, underscore "how cyber activity continues to be extrinsically linked to global economic and geopolitical forces, and the ability for threat actors to rapidly pivot to meet those emerging opportunities."

CrowdStrike's response to these growing threats includes education and knowledge sharing through its annual security conference, known as Falcon. For 2020, this event will be held virtually, a change prompted by the global pandemic, on Friday 16 October at 2:30pm for participants in Australia and New Zealand.

"It's really become the must-attend business and technology experience for global cyber security stakeholders and our community more broadly," Francis said. The conference will feature keynotes from CEO George Kurtz, President and Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry, Chief Product Officer Amol Kulkarni, and CTO Mike Sentonas. Case studies will also be highlighted, including one from the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team, in a session joined by Lewis Hamilton and team CEO Toto Wolff, who will discuss how CrowdStrike supports their security needs.

Asked how potential partners or end users could engage with CrowdStrike, Francis encouraged reaching out via familiar channels. "If an end user or a partner wanted to connect with CrowdStrike, first and foremost I would encourage them to reach out via the usual channels via the website, or look me up on LinkedIn," he said. He stressed the company's commitment to engagement: "We're very focused on engaging, continuing to engage with customers – existing and new – in this part of the world, as well as partners. If organisations out there think that CrowdStrike can solve a security problem for them or help them with their go-to-market, then we'd certainly like to have a conversation with them."

Francis closed the interview with a note of appreciation, saying simply, "Thanks for the opportunity."