Cloudflare, Crowdstrike CEOs Spar Over Future of Cybersecurity Business
October 17 2017 - 7:32PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. -- Two prominent executives in the
cybersecurity industry on Tuesday debated whether the field is a
long-term business -- or instead will be blended into the array of
services tech giants offer customers.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's WSJ D.Live technology
conference, Cloudflare Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Prince said
major tech companies like Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s
Google have the scale and resources to make cybersecurity an
ordinary feature of their cloud-computing platforms and other
services. Much like email-spam protection is part of Gmail, he
said, cybersecurity likely will come "built into more and more
platforms over time."
Mr. Prince hopes Cloudflare -- which supports and protects
websites, handling nearly 10% of all internet requests -- will be
one of those platforms, but "I don't think there will be many, if
any, standalone security companies that exist."
George Kurtz, CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc., shot
back that hackers evolve quickly and are always trying new methods,
a reality that requires the deep expertise of dedicated security
firms, he said. "Security is such a specialized sport," he said at
the conference. Platforms like Google and Amazon "can't make the
very deep, focused investments that security companies can."
Cybersecurity breaches have been a major issue this year, from
the WannaCry ransomware that infected more than 200,000 computers
in more than 100 countries to the massive hack at credit-reporting
firm Equifax Inc. that compromised the personal data of potentially
145.5 million Americans. This month, Verizon Communications Inc.
said that a 2013 hack of Yahoo, which it acquired this year, was
far more extensive than previously disclosed, affecting all of
Yahoo's 3 billion accounts.
Mr. Kurtz said companies like CrowdStrike are needed to protect
against such breaches because of their specialized knowledge of
hackers' methods.
But Mr. Prince said cybersecurity is becoming easier because of
the massive data tech giants are amassing, which enables them to
more easily track patterns of behavior and spot anomalies that
could be hacking attempts. "Security is really a big-data problem,"
he said.
Cloudflare was drawn into a controversy over censorship on the
internet in August when it pulled support for neo-Nazi website the
Daily Stormer, a move Mr. Prince later worried would set precedent
for the company to weigh in on other controversial sites it
supported.
On Tuesday, Mr. Prince said Cloudflare was consulting with
government officials, think tanks and others on developing a more
firm policy to handle such sites, which he said Cloudflare would
announce when it is ready.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 17, 2017 19:17 ET (23:17 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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