In recent months, the internet has become a dangerous place for a lot of major cooperations and even some governments. Everyone from Target, JC Penny, and even the U.S. federal government, has come under fire from cyber attacks. In light of this tech giant, Google looks to be doing everything it can to not join that now infamous list. Sources close to the Internet security startup company, CrowdStrike, say they are about to get a massive $100 million investment from Google Capital. Google Capital is a different division of Google. It is not to be confused with Google Venture, which is the venture capital firm of the company. This investment from Google Capital far exceeds CrowdStrike’s largest previous investment of $56 million.
Being relatively new on the scene not much is known about CrowdStrike, and what role they will play with Google. What we do know is CrowdStrike was formed in 2011 by two former McAfee executives. The services that surely attracted Google is a cloud tool that CrowdStrike says can help governments and companies find and stop cyber attacks while they are occurring in real time. CrowdStrike displayed their ability to use this tool this past April. CrowdStrike was successfully able to thwart an attack on U.S. companies by a Chinese hacker group who call themselves “Hurricane Panda” who were attempting to use a hole in Windows software called “0-day”. Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder, and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike spoke to Reuters last April and had this to say about the attack, “They realized that we had raised the cost and given the time and money wasted on the previous 0-day, decided it wasn’t worth it,” he said. “It was the first time we’d seen that.”
CrowdStrike said it has many clients throughout the tech and business industry including some in the oil and gas field. It remains to be seen if Google will absorb CrowdStrike or if they will be allowed to keep their other clients. Google probably won’t make a statement on their large investment until next week, so right now all the information is coming from an inside source close to CrowdStrike.