16 Mar Debugging the Cyber Selloff

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February 2026 Insights

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Debugging the Cyber Selloff

Cybersecurity firms have taken a beating recently, another victim of the AI doom trade. This has been fuelled by suggestions that the leading AI software may soon be able to spin up a vibe-coded CrowdStrike, the leader in its field. Mania and structural change can be difficult to tell apart, as there is often some signal amongst the noise. AI is definitely a revolutionary technology, and the rate of progress, particularly within coding abilities, has been profound. This has culminated in a broad software sector sell-off that appears to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater by lumping in the cybersecurity firms. Whilst your non-technical son-in-law may have been able to vibe-code his own to-do list app, cybersecurity is a problem that is at a much deeper and more difficult to replicate level of the infrastructure stack.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO, George Kurtz, got this point across in an undeniably hilarious way on LinkedIn last weekend. He asked Claude Code, an application by Anthropic that has been a major catalyst for the software/cyber-sell off, to do exactly what the market fears. Build me a tool to replace CrowdStrike.

Here is a snippet from his post:

Prompt 1:
In Claude code, build me a tool to replace CrowdStrike

Answer:
“I appreciate the ambition, George, but I have to be straightforward: building a replacement for CrowdStrike isn’t something I can do here, and it wouldn’t be
responsible for me to suggest otherwise.

CrowdStrike is a massive platform built by thousands of engineers over a decade-plus. Its core capabilities include real-time kernel-level endpoint monitoring across millions of devices, a proprietary threat intelligence graph built from trillions of security events, lightweight agents running on every OS with sub-second detection, automated incident response and remediation, and a 24/7 threat hunting operation. That’s not something you can replicate with a script — it’s an infrastructure product.”

It is clear that AI is going to change the world. But that does not mean that the tried and true competitive advantages of old are no longer relevant. The leading cybersecurity firms have the benefit of the widest customer bases, granting them the vastest datasets, which are vital for improving their best-in-class security systems. Add to this a cybersecurity market expanding precisely because of AI, with each new agent requiring its own defence against a growing volume of attacks, and the picture becomes clear: for best-in-breed firms like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, staples of High Street’s Wealth Warriors Fund, AI is a tailwind, not a headwind. Just as it was in mid-2024, when CrowdStrike’s share price crashed 45%, Warren Buffett’s wisdom to be “fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” feels apt once more.

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Unless otherwise stated, all performance and statistical figures provided in this article have been pulled from Bloomberg by the High Street Asset Management Research Team on 25 February 2026 and all the images provided in this article have been sourced from FreePik and have been used in line with their Acceptable Use Policy. The contents of our newsletters are frequently sourced from or verified through our various product providers and other third parties. Although every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the newsletter, it should not be construed as financial advice as defined in the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act. Links are provided to third-party websites for convenience only. High Street Asset Management (Pty) Ltd cannot accept responsibility and does not endorse any information contained on a third-party site. For our full disclaimer, please see: https://hsam.co.za/legal/.

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© High Street Asset Management (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved | FSP No. 45210 | Legal Disclaimers

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