Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.’s (NASDAQ:CRWD) CEO George Kurtz issued a stark warning during the company's third-quarter earnings, citing a growing wave of AI-driven cyber threats from adversarial nation-states, including China.
AI Is Expanding ‘Attack Surface’
During the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, Kurtz said, “AI is rapidly expanding the attack surface,” noting that businesses are beginning to onboard a whole new type of workforce, “the agentic workforce.”
“Humans using agents to do more and agents working by themselves, each with access to data, applications, compute, and sometimes even other agents,” he said, underscoring a new set of complications and potential threats that most enterprises are now exposed to.
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He added, “Now, just as anyone can use AI to vibe code and become a software engineer, anyone can now also vibe hack, becoming a sophisticated adversary with AI.”
Kurtz pointed to several recent incidents and developments that underscore the urgency of securing these new AI environments. “Just a few weeks ago, a major AI company shared that China state-sponsored adversaries were using their LLM to create and operationalize active cyber intrusion agents,” he said, without naming the company.
“This is just one of the many AI-enabled attacks we've seen,” he said, adding that “The AI cyber battleground is no longer theoretical. It's now real.”
CrowdStrike is positioning itself as a core layer of protection for this new digital paradigm. “CrowdStrike is both the armor and intelligence layer that keeps each agentic identity secure,” Kurtz said, noting that the company provides “security by design for the world's cloud and token factories.”
Stock Drops Despite Beat-And-Raise Q3 Performance
The company reported its third-quarter results on Tuesday, reporting $1.23 billion in revenue, up 22% year-over-year, and ahead of consensus estimates at $1.22 billion. Profits during the quarter stood at $0.96 per share, against estimates at $0.94 the prior year.
CrowdStrike also raised its full-year outlook, now expecting revenue between $4.797 billion and $4.807 billion, up from its prior guidance of $4.749 billion and $4.805 billion.
Despite the beat on consensus estimates and raising its outlook, the stock is down 2.11% overnight following the results. The company’s shares were up 2.46% on Tuesday, closing at $516.55 during the regular session.
The stock scores high on Momentum in Benzinga’s Edge Stock Rankings, with a favorable price trend in the Medium and Long terms. Click here for deeper insights into the stock, its peers and competitors.
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