Champions strike data deal

World champions Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport has signed a global partnership with a leading endpoint security company to ensure its racing data stays safe as it aims to secure another team and driver victory this season.

As highlighted previously in FinTech Focus, when thousandths of a second can make the difference between success and failure, it’s no wonder Formula One teams are fuelled by a desire for secrecy, partly driven by memories of historic espionage controversies.

Mercedes announced its partnership with CrowdStrike shortly before the new season started with a one-two finish in Australia, and the outfit is working to protect the team from cyberattacks.

The champions will use CrowdStrike’s technology platform and services at the Sakhir race track in Bahrain this coming weekend, as well as the team’s F1 technology unit in the English town of Brackley.

“Formula One is a highly technical sport where intellectual property is fundamental to creating and sustaining competitive advantage,” explained Toto Wolff, team principal and CEO.

“To win, we need complete confidence in the information and infrastructure that drive our team. I’m delighted to have CrowdStrike as our cybersecurity provider and partner.”

Mercedes manages huge amounts of information – each car produces 500GB of data alone during an average grand prix weekend with a further 5-10TB produced per week at the factory.

Additionally, the team’s operations are founded on a complex network of geographically-dispersed workforce and facilities, opening up exposure to cyberattacks.

CrowdStrike Falcon aims to solve these challenges by enabling critical threat protection through immediate seamless deployments across thousands of endpoints – all via its native cloud architecture.

“Formula One is a highly data-intensive sport – and winning teams know that by leveraging and protecting vast amounts of critical data they can create a true competitive advantage,” said George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder at CrowdStrike.

“We believe the partnership between Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport and CrowdStrike is setting a new standard in motorsport and cybersecurity. 

“It is an example of a world-beating team striving for excellence in a sophisticated and highly-competitive world like Formula One, turning to the world leader in large-scale cloud-delivered cybersecurity to protect its massive infrastructure on race day and throughout the year.

“Major global sporting events around the world are the target of widespread cyberattacks and the more successful a team is, the more likely they are to be the targets of hackers and ‘eCrime’ actors looking for intellectual property or notoriety.

“CrowdStrike is excited to be the team to protect against these attacks damaging the reputation and operation of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, enabling them to focus on what they do best … winning races and championships.”

CrowdStrike becomes the fifth partner of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport from Silicon Valley, further strengthening the team’s integrated approach to the digital world, the team said.

Data is becoming increasingly more important in the world of Formula One and the team is working closely with global leaders in technology to harvest, transmit, encrypt, store, analyse and protect its data in the hunt for improved performance and reliability.

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the CrowdStrike Falcon platform offers instant visibility and protection across the enterprise and prevents attacks on endpoints on or off the network, the company boasts. It deploys in minutes to deliver actionable intelligence and real-time protection – seamlessly unifies next-generation AV with endpoint detection and response, backed by 24/7 managed hunting.

Its cloud infrastructure and single-agent architecture take away complexity and add scalability, manageability and speed.

CrowdStrike Falcon claims to protect customers against all cyber-attack types, using sophisticated signatureless AI and Indicator-of-Attack (IOA) based threat prevention to stop known and unknown threats in real time.

Powered by the CrowdStrike Threat Graph, Falcon instantly correlates one trillion security events a week from across the globe to immediately prevent and detect threats.

“There’s much more to the story of how Falcon has redefined endpoint protection but there’s only one thing to remember about CrowdStrike: We stop breaches,” added George, an internationally-recognised security expert, author, entrepreneur and speaker. He has more than 23 years of experience in the security space.

As reported after last season’s final race in Abu Dhabi, Williams announced a new technology partnership with Acronis, a hybrid cloud data protection and storage company. As part of the agreement, Acronis started delivering data protection solutions, including back-up, disaster recovery, software-defined storage, and file sync and share.