CrowdStrike Unhappy With ‘Shady Commentary’ From Competitors After Outage

CrowdStrike’s president hit out at “shady” efforts by its cyber security rivals to scare its customers and steal market share in the month since its botched software update sparked a global IT outage. From a report: Michael Sentonas told the Financial Times that attempts by competitors to use the July 19 disruption to promote their own products were “misguided.” After criticism from rivals including SentinelOne and Trellix, the CrowdStrike executive said no vendor could “technically” guarantee that their own software would never cause a similar incident.

“Our industry is built on trust,” Sentonas said. For rivals to take advantage of the meltdown to push their own products “lets themselves down because, ultimately, people know really quickly fact from, possibly, some shady commentary.” Texas-based CrowdStrike had a reputation as many major companies’ first line of defense against cyber attacks, but the high-profile nature of its clients exacerbated the impact of July’s global disruption that shut down 8.5 million Windows devices. Insurers have estimated that losses from the disruption, which grounded flights and shut down hospital systems, could run into billions of dollars. Delta Air Lines, which canceled more than 6,000 flights, has estimated that the outages will cost it $500 million and has threatened litigation.