Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Trump Takes Aim At CrowdStrike
Irvine-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appears to be the latest victim of unsubstantiated "facts" from the current White House administration, as President Trump inferred that the company, incorrectly, is owned by a "very rich Ukrainian". The company is actually backed by Google Capital, Rackspace, Accel Partners, and Warburg Pincus. CrowdStrike's founder is George Kurtz, who founded Irvine's Foundstone, and later sold it to McAfee. Axios reports that the incorrect White House assertion might be because CrowdStrike's co-founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch (an American citizen) is of Russian heritage. CrowdStrike's executives were active in boosting U.S. cybersecurity under the prior administration, alongside executives from IBM, MasterCard, Microsoft, and others.