George Kurtz: From Hacking Exposed to CrowdStrike's Worst Day

On the morning of July 19, 2024, screens around the world went blue, and the name on the update was CrowdStrike. Its chief executive, George Kurtz, had built the company on the promise of stopping breaches; now it'd caused one of the largest IT outages ever seen, without a single hacker involved.

Kurtz is the rare security boss who started out as a certified public accountant, co-wrote the book that taught a generation to hack, and sold his first company to McAfee before founding another that went public at a record valuation.

He also races prototype sports cars, which turned out to be decent preparation for the worst Friday of his career.

George Kurtz at a Glance

• Kurtz took an accounting degree at Seton Hall University and qualified as a New Jersey CPA before moving into security work at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young.
• With Stuart McClure and Joel Scambray he co-wrote Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions, a franchise now in its seventh edition.
• In October 1999 he started the consultancy Foundstone; McAfee bought it in October 2004, and Kurtz rose to worldwide chief technology officer.
• In April 2010, on his watch, a McAfee virus-definition update flagged a core Windows file as malware and locked up XP machines around the world.
• In September 2011 he co-founded CrowdStrike with Dmitri Alperovitch, betting on a cloud-native platform and on naming the attackers.
• CrowdStrike listed on the Nasdaq on June 12, 2019, and the stock jumped more than 70 percent on its first day.
• On July 19, 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike content update crashed about 8.5 million Windows devices in a 78-minute window. Kurtz apologized the same day.
• By 2026 Time had named CrowdStrike one of the 100 most influential companies, Kurtz had joined the board of Kevin Mandia's Armadin, and his CrowdStrike Racing team had won an IMSA championship.

The Life of George Kurtz

The Accountant Who Learned to Hack

Kurtz's path into security ran through a ledger. He earned a bachelor's degree in accounting at Seton Hall University and became a certified public accountant in New Jersey, a license he still holds on inactive status.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young he held senior security roles, learning the trade from the auditor's side: how systems fail, and how to prove it.

With Stuart McClure and Joel Scambray he co-wrote Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions, a step-by-step tour of attacks and countermeasures. It became a franchise, now in its seventh edition, and CrowdStrike's official biography still calls it the best-selling security book of all time.

Foundstone

In October 1999 Kurtz started Foundstone, a security consultancy whose alumni include Kevin Mandia, who ran its computer forensics practice in 2000 before founding Mandiant.

McAfee acquired Foundstone in October 2004. Kurtz stayed and climbed, eventually serving as worldwide chief technology officer and general manager at what was then a $2.5 billion security company.

The First Bad Update

On April 21, 2010, McAfee shipped virus-definition file DAT 5958. It flagged svchost.exe, a core Windows process, as malicious, and Windows XP machines fell into reboot loops; the SANS Internet Storm Center logged dozens of reports within hours.

Kurtz was McAfee's chief technology officer at the time. Fourteen years later, when CrowdStrike broke the internet, Business Insider would note that it was the second time he'd been at the center of a global tech failure.

Founding CrowdStrike

In September 2011 Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike with Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's former vice president of threat research. The pitch was a cloud-native endpoint platform and an intelligence operation that named the adversaries it found, bears for Russia and pandas for China.

Kurtz took the CEO job and kept it. On June 12, 2019, CrowdStrike listed on the Nasdaq; CNBC reported that the stock popped more than 70 percent in its debut, valuing the company at over $11 billion, and CRN called its $6.6 billion IPO valuation an industry record.

July 19, 2024

At 04:09 UTC on July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike pushed a content update, Channel File 291, to Windows hosts running its Falcon sensor. The file supplied 21 input fields where the sensor expected 20, and the out-of-bounds memory read crashed machines into the blue screen of death.

CrowdStrike identified the defect and reverted it at 05:27 UTC, 78 minutes later, but any affected host online in that window had already gone down. Microsoft estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices were hit, less than one percent of all Windows machines, though many of them ran critical services.

"I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for the outage," Kurtz said that day. By July 29 about 99 percent of Windows sensors were back online, and on August 6 he closed the final report: "We are deeply sorry for the impact this had on you. Nothing is more important than regaining your trust."

Forbes tallied how much of Kurtz's own fortune evaporated as the stock fell. The bigger question was whether customers would stay.

The Comeback

They largely did. Two years on, Barron's wrote that a software glitch had nearly sunk CrowdStrike and that its boss had brought it back from the brink.

In April 2026 Time put CrowdStrike on its list of the 100 most influential companies, and the same month Kurtz joined the board of Armadin, the AI security startup founded by his old Foundstone colleague Kevin Mandia.

By August 2026 he was telling CNBC that a "Mythos moment" in AI was driving a quarter of records, and the stock jumped 11 percent on the results. In September he was back on the network warning that AI "agent states" were the new apex predators, and that the genie was out of the bottle.

Kurtz at the Wheel

Kurtz doesn't only run a company called CrowdStrike; he drives for one. CrowdStrike Racing by APR fields the No. 04 ORECA LMP2 07 in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, with Kurtz, a bronze-rated driver, sharing the car with Alex Quinn and Toby Sowery.

In October 2026 a gamble on slick tires in a downpour at Petit Le Mans sealed the team's LMP2 championship along with the Endurance Cup title.

"To be able to put it all on the line... to actually have it all fall into place... it's a lifelong dream," Kurtz said.

He also became the first repeat winner of IMSA's Jim Trueman Award, in 2023 and 2026. "When you look up and down the P2 lineup, it's stacked," he said. "To win an IMSA championship is a crowning achievement."

George Kurtz: Fast Recovery

Kurtz's story has two global outages in it, and that's exactly why it's worth telling. The second time, he put his name on the apology within hours and spent the next two years earning back the trust.

The company he co-founded in 2011 survived the worst day a security vendor can have and came out the other side on Time's list of the 100 most influential companies.

And on race weekends he still straps into a prototype race car and drives into the rain on slick tires, which is either a hobby or a philosophy.