Cybersecurity is already the No. 1 challenge facing most enterprises, and now artificial intelligence is providing both potent new tools to battle attackers and making it easier for those attackers as well.

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. is aiming to leverage AI to give enterprises and their security operations centers more and better services so they can stay ahead of those increasingly capable attackers.

“When we think about how AI is transforming the world, it’s also transforming what the adversaries are doing, and the speed at which they’re moving has changed dramatically,” CrowdStrike Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz (pictured) told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in an interview at CrowdStrike Fal.con, the company’s annual conference in Las Vegas. “It used to be weeks, then days, then hours and minutes. Now it’s seconds. The traditional SOC can’t keep up.”

Not surprisingly, Kurtz views AI — in particular agents, the autonomous systems seen as the next frontier of AI — as the answer. CrowdStrike introduced two new agentic systems aimed at bolstering cybersecurity, which itself is threatened by generative AI making attackers more capable than ever. They’re the Agentic Security Platform, an AI-ready data layer powering what Kurtz calls the “agentic SOC,” and the Agentic Security Workforce, a series of ready-made agents for cybersecurity tasks along with a platform for customers to create their own custom agents.

“One day we’re going to have an autonomous SOC analyst that is literally going to do the work of the analyst and then be controlled by the human,” Kurtz said. “It’s going to allow people to do more and faster.”

Kurtz spoke with theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight today in an interview at CrowdStrike Fal.con, where theCUBE is onsite for two days of interviews and analysis. They discussed CrowdStrike’s new products, its essential advantage as the Reddit of data security, and the thinking behind today’s $260 million acquisition of Pangea Cyber Corp. (* Disclosure below.)

The Reddit of data security

Kurtz noted that data is the overriding key to making AI large language models work, and nowhere more than in cybersecurity. Over its 14-year history, CrowdStrike has collected huge amounts of data and, even more important, annotated that data from telemetry on trillions of security events per day in a way that happens to make it useful to train LLMs.

“CrowdStrike really has the Reddit of data security,” he said in a reference to the social network known as the “front page of the internet.” “We’ve got a treasure trove of security data that goes into our AI agents.”

More than that, he added, that enables customers to build more capable agents of their own with CrowdStrike’s Charlotte AI AgentWorks. That’s a no-code platform for building, testing, deploying and orchestrating security agents at large scale.

Self-driving security

Kurtz said CrowdStrike’s ultimate goal is to build “Security AGI,” a reference to the goal of some AI companies such as OpenAI to create “artificial general intelligence” as capable in many tasks as humans. He says that’s a ways off, but he cited self-driving cars such as Waymo’s that are climbing the levels of autonomy.

“We get to something that’s beyond what a human can do and is self-operating, continuously learns and is fully autonomous,” he said. “We’re going to do it first.”

Managing a million agents

But Kurtz acknowledged that AI agents will require people and new tools to manage them, especially as they proliferate potentially into the millions. That’s one reason CrowdStrike today acquired Pangea for a reported $260 million. It provides protections against so-called prompt injection attacks, in which hackers aim to trick LLMs into skirting safety rules and exposing data.

“There’s so many different attacks at the prompt layer,” Kurtz said. “The cool thing about Pangea is they actually built technology for the developers, as well as for the people who are consuming the AI technology. That’s going to be a a big part of our strategy when you put it on the Falcon platform.”

Avoiding digital taxidermy

A few cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Check Point Software Inc. are aiming to become the one platform their customers need — despite the reality that customers still seem to want best-of-breed new tools. Kurtz said his mergers-and-acquisitions strategy differs from some others that have made huge acquisitions of established companies in that he wants to avoid the difficulty of incorporating old technologies.

“What’s best for our customers is a single platform,” he said, and they’re not served by being provided with older services that aren’t integrated with that platform.” He called that “digital taxidermy,” explaining that “it looks alive, but its Frankenstein underneath. Our brand promise is that … when we buy something … we’re going to integrate it all. We’ve been a platform for a long time.”

Here’s the full interview with Kurtz:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Fal.Con. The sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: CrowdStrike/livestream