Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a more frequent target of cybercrime than large companies, a trend largely driven by their lack of security resources and expertise. Some SMBs are at greater risk than others: Nonprofit SMBs face a higher incidence of high and critical-severity cyberattacks compared to those in other sectors. On the surface, the frequency of attacks targeting nonprofit SMBs may seem counterintuitive.

Software development practices are rapidly changing, and so are the methods adversaries use to target custom applications. The rise of loosely coupled applications, along with an impressive increase in code deployment speed, has resulted in a growing attack surface with more software architecture and imported dependencies. Application security (AppSec) teams are often outnumbered by software developers and struggle to keep up with frequent code changes.

Today’s adversaries are moving faster than ever. With the quickest attacks happening in just 7 minutes, adversaries are compromising endpoints and moving laterally before security teams can respond.1 It’s critical for organizations to have the technology to stay ahead of them.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms says it all. Today, I’m incredibly honored and proud to announce CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms. We have been positioned furthest right for Completeness of Vision and highest for Ability to Execute among 16 vendors evaluated in the report.

A new IDC white paper, “The Business Value of The CrowdStrike Falcon XDR Platform,” sponsored by CrowdStrike, highlights the substantial operational benefits, cost savings and ROI that organizations achieve when consolidating their cybersecurity point products with the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon XDR platform. Organizations switching to the CrowdStrike platform realized significant advantages.

According to the CrowdStrike 2023 Global Threat Report, there was a 95% increase in cloud exploits in 2022, with a three-fold increase in cases involving cloud-conscious threat actors. The cloud is rapidly becoming a major battleground for cyberattacks — and the cost of a breach has never been higher.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework, a key resource for helping organizations defend against cyberattacks, is critical to advancing cybersecurity research. The MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense’s public library of adversary-specific emulation plans has become a valuable component of the ATT&CK framework. Each plan in the library provides comprehensive ATT&CK tactics and techniques employed by well-known adversaries.

Today’s security practitioners face a daunting challenge: Staying ahead of sophisticated adversaries who have turned their attention to the expansive terrain of cloud environments. CrowdStrike observed a 95% year-over-year increase in cloud exploitation in 2022. This trend demands strategic reevaluation of how organizations protect their cloud environments and workloads, and emphasizes the importance of choosing the right cloud security capabilities.

Since announcing Charlotte AI, we’ve engaged with many customers to show how this transformational technology will unlock greater speed and value for security teams and expand their arsenal in the fight against modern adversaries. Customer reception has been overwhelmingly positive as organizations see how Charlotte AI will make their teams faster, more productive and learn new skills, which is critical to beat the adversaries in the emerging generative AI arms race.