GoKawiilIt's been a good quarter for technology stocks, and cybersecurity leaders Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike have both joined the historic rally.
CrowdStrike and Palo Alto rallied 95% and 113%, respectively, between April and June for their best quarter on record, as new artificial intelligence tools have spiked demand for more sophisticated cyber defense. Those tailwinds allowed the sector to shake off early concerns that it would falter with the death of software as a service and emerge as a key stack in the age of AI.
Driving that demand is the onslaught of Mythos-class models capable of being used by hackers to uncover software vulnerabilities and launch full-scale attacks. That's left companies scrambling to beef up their cybersecurity defenses.
"What the Mythos moment proved is that the world, starting from the frontier AI labs themselves, realized that AI needs a cybersecurity ecosystem," CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told analysts earlier this month on an earnings call. "This was a Mythos inflection point."
Over the last few months, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto have positioned themselves at the forefront of the AI cyber race through Mythos, the model deemed too powerful to release to the public.