George Kurtz
Security veteran who founded CrowdStrike in 2011 to replace heavy antivirus with a lightweight cloud agent — and in 2024 led the company through the largest IT outage in history.
Kurtz founded the security consultancy Foundstone, acquired by McAfee in 2004, and went on to serve as McAfee's CTO. He co-wrote the standard reference Hacking Exposed and, on the side, races cars. His conviction was that heavy, signature-based antivirus was the problem rather than the cure.
In 2011 he co-founded CrowdStrike with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston around a lightweight agent that streams telemetry to the cloud. The model held — until a faulty update to the Falcon sensor in July 2024 blue-screened roughly 8.5 million Windows machines at once, on his watch.