https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49902/the-russian-emigre-leading-the-fight-to-protect-america/
[Crowdstrike]
[Renee James]
Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike, the idea that attribution ought to be a central defense against hackers was viewed as heresy. In 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee. While sifting through server logs in his apartment one night, he discovered evidence of a hacking campaign by the Chinese government. Eventually he learned that the campaign had been going on undetected for five years, and that the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the International Olympic Committee.
That the Chinese government had been stealing information from the private sector was a shock to the security industry and to many U. S. officials. Almost no one thought that foreign governments used the Internet for anything other than old-fashioned espionage. "This was not spy versus spy," says John Carlin, who was until recently the assistant attorney general for national security. The hacking was economic sabotage.
While Alperovitch was writing up his report on the breach, he received a call from Renee James, an executive at Intel, which had recently purchased McAfee. According to Alperovitch, James told him, "Dmitri, Intel has a lot of business in China. You cannot call out China in this report."
Alperovitch removed the word China from his analysis, calling the operation Shady Rat instead. He told me that James's intervention accelerated his plans to leave Intel. (James declined to comment.) He felt that he was "now being censored because I'm working for a company that's not really an American company."