George Kurtz

George Kurtz: Career Highlights

Kurtz began his career at Price Waterhouse as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). In 1993, he joined Price Waterhouse's new security group, where he co-wrote the book "Hacking Exposed" with Stuart McClure and Joel Scambray in 1999. This book became a bestseller and is considered a foundational text in the field of cybersecurity.

In 1999, Kurtz founded his own cybersecurity company called Foundstone. The company was acquired by McAfee for $86 million in 2004, and Kurtz became the senior vice president and general manager of risk management at McAfee. In 2009, he was appointed worldwide chief technology officer and executive vice president.

During his time at McAfee, Kurtz participated in Operation Aurora in 2010, which was a major cyber attack on Google and other companies. He also led McAfee's research on the Night Dragon and Shady RAT threats in 2011.

In October 2011, Kurtz resigned from McAfee and joined Warburg Pincus as an "entrepreneur-in-residence." In 2012, he co-founded CrowdStrike with Gregg Marston and Dmitri Alperovitch. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company that focuses on identifying hacker techniques and providing cloud-based security solutions.

Under Kurtz's leadership, CrowdStrike has grown rapidly and has attracted significant public interest for its investigations into major cyber attacks, including the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks in 2016. The company exceeded a $1 billion valuation in May 2017 and had a successful initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq in 2019, which brought the company to a $6.6 billion valuation.

In July 2020, CrowdStrike was named the fastest-growing endpoint security software vendor by IDC.