CrowdStrike Incident Response (IR) services sees firsthand why organizations facing today’s evolving threat landscape require advanced capabilities to detect, respond, and remediate cyberattacks in near real time. These observations continue to shape our approach to delivering unparalleled incident response.
In this blog, we detail how CrowdStrike IR has evolved to leverage a 24/7 global response model, AI augmented analysis, and the vertically integrated CrowdStrike Falcon® platform to help organizations most effectively respond to modern attacks.
More than Just an Investigation
CrowdStrike’s IR services go beyond traditional investigation and recovery methods. From immediate threat containment to rapid remediation and real-time visibility, we provide a holistic response to every incident. When incidents occur, CrowdStrike IR leverages advanced methodologies and tools to deliver:
- Incident Command and Coordination: In each investigation, CrowdStrike IR is the incident commander and coordinator, providing crucial leadership, ensuring rapid, clear, and concise communication across all stakeholders, and guiding strategic risk-focused decision-making.
- Threat Detection, Containment, and Removal: CrowdStrike IR, paired with Active Defense Services (ADS), uses the Falcon platform with modules including CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM, CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Threat Protection, and CrowdStrike Falcon® Shield SaaS security to rapidly identify and neutralize malicious activities at the source, whether it’s an endpoint, identity, or a cloud or SaaS environment.
- 24/7/365 Response: CrowdStrike IR is a global team, which allows for follow-the-sun and dedicated weekend IR support. ADS works in conjunction with the IR team, ensuring rapid remediation of adversary activity through the Falcon platform.
- Efficiency and Flexibility: In addition to using the Falcon platform, CrowdStrike IR follows a technology-agnostic approach that uses previously recorded telemetry from existing security tools to gain additional insights into an incident.
- Augmented with AI: CrowdStrike’s GenAI models are trained and leveraged to augment incident responder analysis to help reverse engineer malware, identify adversary patterns, and discover new indicators of attack.
- Customer Communications: More aspects of incident response involve assisting organizations during internal and external communication efforts. CrowdStrike IR supports initiatives ranging from public-facing factual summaries to briefing C-suites, boards, auditors, and regulators.
- Restoration and Recovery: CrowdStrike IR has global partnerships in place to support customers in need of restoration and recovery actions, such as rebuilding systems or applications, deploying security technologies, and implementing security controls.
Browse all of our service offerings in the CrowdStrike Professional Services Catalog.
The Falcon Platform: A Foundation for Advanced Security
The Falcon platform ensures CrowdStrike IR is the gold standard in cybersecurity through rapid visibility, containment, and response in modern cross-domain intrusions. Below are some key differentiators that allow CrowdStrike IR to stop the bleeding and identify adversary activity as quickly as possible.
1. Cross-domain Visibility Powered by Falcon Next-Gen SIEM: A SIEM Replacement for Real-Time and Historical Visibility
Falcon Next-Gen SIEM enables CrowdStrike IR to collect, analyze, and act on vast amounts of log data in real time. With its high speed and massive ingestion and querying capabilities on a petabyte scale, Falcon Next-Gen SIEM serves as a modern SIEM replacement that:
- Provides an instant replication and/or replacement vehicle for SIEMs
- Offers rapid visibility into historical and real-time security events through its index-free architecture
- Handles structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
- Streamlines threat detection and root cause analysis
As an example, CrowdStrike IR used Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to rapidly search petabytes of data across disparate sources, such as a SIEM that included endpoint security events from an existing legacy EDR tool, network appliance logs, and cloud plane logs from major providers. With Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, searching these sources took a handful of days. If this had to be performed without Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, most IR teams would need the following:
- VPN with VDI or cloud-based accounts for remote access, or laptops shipped for access to the customer’s existing SIEM
- A limited timeline for search criteria to maximize efficiency of existing SIEM and other search protocols
- Manual input of indicators and findings into a centralized tracker to cross-search each log data source
The aforementioned processes would likely take weeks or even months when totaling hundreds of terabytes and into petabyte territory.
By integrating Falcon Next-Gen SIEM as a backbone of the incident response workflow, CrowdStrike IR ensures quick and centralized detection and understanding of threats. When it comes to logs, organizations have historically avoided a broadly scoped approach in favor of balancing nice-to-have and needed telemetry. With Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, CrowdStrike IR can take a broad scope to gain maximum coverage and visibility while achieving rapid results typically only seen with an extremely narrow scope.
2. Falcon Cloud Security and Falcon Shield: Cloud Plane and SaaS Threat Visibility and Protection
Today’s adversaries are taking aim at cloud and SaaS environments. The CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report found a 26% increase in new and unattributed cloud intrusions in 2024, indicating more adversaries seek to exploit cloud services. Several eCrime and targeted intrusion adversaries used access to cloud-based SaaS applications to obtain data to facilitate lateral movement, extortion, and downstream targeting of third parties throughout 2024.
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud workloads and SaaS applications, CrowdStrike IR heavily uses CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security and CrowdStrike Falcon Shield.
CrowdStrike IR leverages Falcon Cloud Security and Falcon Shield to:
- Detect misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in cloud assets and SaaS environments
- Automate responses to remediate risks before they can be exploited
- Identify historical or real-time adversary activity during an investigation
Adversaries will likely continue to exploit multiple domains, specifically cloud-based SaaS applications, to access sensitive data and move laterally. Front-line trends show adversaries are increasingly only interested in cloud storage and SaaS environments, rather than on-premises, as these typically contain more sensitive operational and/or confidential information that adversaries use for extortion or nation-state advantage.
As organizations migrate data from on-premises systems to cloud-based services, adversaries are expected to continue adapting their tradecraft accordingly, especially those that traditionally have not explored the cloud or SaaS spaces.
3. Identity Threat Protection: Securing the Human Element
Identity remains a key vector in every incident response investigation. Like Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, the Falcon Identity Threat Protection module is leveraged in almost every CrowdStrike IR investigation. This module:
- Detects and mitigates identity-based attacks and/or risks of an attack such as credential theft and privilege escalation
- Provides visibility into identity providers such as Active Directory, Entra ID, AWS Identity and Access Management, and Google Workspace
- Allows for additional verification challenges (e.g., multifactor authentication challenges) and security controls (e.g., privileged accounts are not allowed to RDP into certain endpoints) based on granular properties such as time, access type, user attributes, and account type
In a recent active adversary “hands-on-keyboard” scenario, CrowdStrike IR used Falcon Identity Threat Protection to quickly identify compromised identities being used by the adversary. In this investigation, the adversary accessed the organization’s SSO provider for SaaS and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) access, and on-premises access through identities from its VPN. Falcon Identity Threat Protection detected both pathways of malicious access and activity. This allowed CrowdStrike IR to work with the victim organization and implement a containment plan for identities that:
- Disabled and/or reset the compromised account’s credentials and MFA token
- Further secured accounts based on Falcon Identity Threat Protection risk score, minimizing risk of account compromises or unauthorized privilege escalation
- Implemented additional MFA challenges for sensitive identity actions
- Implemented security access controls for certain identities
With Falcon Identity Threat Protection, CrowdStrike IR can quickly identify suspicious and/or malicious activity faster than ever, allowing the investigation to progress into the containment and remediation phases seamlessly and with confidence.
Global Reach and Always-On Expertise
Cyberattacks don’t adhere to business hours, and neither does CrowdStrike IR, which is powered by a global team that ensures a rapid response through:
- Global coordination with follow-the-sun coverage: CrowdStrike IR provides support across multiple regions around the world, leveraging a follow-the-sun model to maximize availability to customers and complete analysis faster.
- Dedicated Weekend Teams: Recognizing the higher likelihood of attacks during off-peak hours, CrowdStrike maintains specialized teams ready to respond to incidents during weekends.
Why Choose CrowdStrike IR Services?
1. Customer-first Approach
Incident response isn’t just about investigative findings. CrowdStrike IR takes a customer-first approach that includes flexibility to support our customers throughout the incident lifecycle, with preliminary factual reporting, briefings, and an always-on expertise operating model.
2. Speed and Precision
Time is critical during a cyberattack. CrowdStrike IR’s follow-the-sun model and the Falcon platform’s real-time capabilities combine to quickly detect, contain, and neutralize threats across endpoint, identity, and cloud environments.
3. Comprehensive Security Coverage
From endpoint to cloud, identity to SaaS applications, CrowdStrike’s IR approach ensures no blind spots in your security posture. We use the most efficient technology and operating models to complete investigations as quickly and securely as possible.
4. Strategic Insights
After an incident, organizations benefit from actionable recommendations and a stronger security strategy to prevent future attacks.
5. Proactive Prevention
With integrated tools like Falcon Shield and Falcon Identity Threat Protection, and an industry-leading incident response retainer model, CrowdStrike helps organizations identify and mitigate risks before they escalate into full-scale incidents.
A Partner in Cybersecurity Resilience
CrowdStrike’s Incident Response services provide more than just a safety net — they offer a strategic advantage in a world where adversaries are ever-present. By leveraging the Falcon platform’s powerful components — next-gen SIEM, identity threat protection, cloud security, and SaaS security — along with a globally distributed team of experts supporting our clients every step of the journey, CrowdStrike IR ensures organizations experiencing an intrusion has a fully invested partner navigating them through choppy waters.
Additional Resources
- Learn more about how CrowdStrike’s Professional Services can help your organization prepare for, respond to, and recover from breaches.
- Get elite IR and proactive defense with a CrowdStrike Services retainer to help build your security program maturity.
- If you’re considering an incident response provider or would like more information about our services, let us know and a CrowdStrike Services team member will be in touch.
