CrowdStrike CEO describes the escalating threat of foreign hackers

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that the cyber threat environment is only getting worse.

“Whenever there’s geopolitical tensions, and I would argue there’s a lot of them right now, this actually drives more activity in a threat environment,” he said. “Adversaries get more active, nation state adversaries get more active, and certainly, in the confusion of that, you have the e-criminals that come out.”

Kurtz said CrowdStrike is seeing “break out times,” or how quickly a hacker is able to enter a system and then move somewhere else in the network, of 51 seconds, a speed the company hasn’t seen in the past. He also warned of hacking efforts by North Korean adversaries, describing a maneuver where they applied to remote jobs at well-known companies. Once hired and sent laptops, the hackers would then send them to “a laptop farm where it’s then controlled by operatives in North Korea,” he said.

The development and application of agentic AI creates the need for new cybersecurity technology, Kurtz continued, which will lead to growth for the whole industry. He explained that each “technology cycle” in the past – like the mainframe, PCs, mobile, the cloud – has required new security measures, and AI is no different.

“There’s going to be a whole wave of new security technologies coming out, some of which CrowdStrike are pioneering,” he said. “And there’s going to be a new wave of buying and securing everything from gathering the dat, to training the data, to doing the inference, to actually building the agentic AI agents and delivering the work flows.”

CrowdStrike posted its quarterly report Tuesday night, and while it delivered a beat, investors were unimpressed with earnings guidance. By the end of Wednesday’s session, CrowdStrike was down more than 6%. On the conference call, Kurtz called the company a “comeback story” as it recovers from a major global outage last year.

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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust holds shares of CrowdStrike.