Case Study: International Republican Institute achieves real-time detection and defense against advanced cyberattacks with CrowdStrike Falcon

International Republican Institute - Customer Case Study

The International Republican Institute (IRI) is a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit that promotes democracy worldwide and operates field offices across Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Because its networks hold sensitive policy and operational information, IRI was a target for politically motivated adversaries; its distributed, remote endpoints and reliance on whitelisting and multiple vendors left gaps in visibility and response, and a firewall failure helped a persistent attack bypass existing controls.

IRI deployed CrowdStrike Falcon’s cloud-based endpoint protection and 24/7 CrowdStrike Security Operations Center (CSOC) services, which provided real-time visibility, threat intelligence and rapid response. Falcon detected a persistent intrusion and a subsequent webshell-based takeover attempt, enabling IRI and the CSOC to terminate adversary access, take compromised systems offline, prevent exploitation, and extend protection to field offices — all while reducing hardware and maintenance costs and allowing IRI to focus on its core mission.

International Republican Institute

Geoff Merck

Director of IT & Telecom