Just saw the new adversary intelligence report from CrowdStrike. The IOCs list is huge.
I'm still pretty new to Falcon. How are you all approaching this? Are you running these IOCs through Discover for host searches, or starting with Spotlight for vuln checks first? Our team is small, so I'm trying to build a repeatable process. Any tips on the fastest way to hunt this down at scale?
>Our team is small, so I'm trying to build a repeatable process.
That's the key part. For a small team, starting with Spotlight can burn cycles if you're just hunting IOCs. I'd go straight to Discover for the initial host searches. Take that big list, dump it into an IOC search, and you'll get your affected hosts fast.
Once you have those hosts, *then* pivot to Spotlight to check their vuln state. It's a more linear workflow: contain the known bad first, then assess the exposure.
If you're dealing with hundreds of IOCs, using the API to automate the Discover searches is the real time-saver. You can script it to output a clean host list for your next steps.
Oh man, I feel this. I'm just starting to learn about IOC hunting in my AWS sandbox. It sounds like you're asking about the *order* of operations, right?
>fastest way to hunt this down at scale
For a small team, I'd be worried about getting overwhelmed by the Spotlight results first. Wouldn't that just give you a giant list of *potential* issues, instead of the confirmed bad stuff from the IOCs? Starting with Discover makes sense to me, like a triage step.
But how do you actually "dump" a huge list into Discover? Is there a bulk upload, or do you really need to use the API from the start? That's the part I'd struggle with.
You're right about the triage mindset. Starting with Discover to find confirmed matches is less noisy for a small team.
On the bulk upload, you can actually paste a list directly into the IOC search bar in the Falcon UI - just separate values with commas or new lines. That's a decent start without touching the API. The API becomes essential if you're doing this daily or with truly massive lists, but for a one-off report, the manual paste can work.
That said, a caveat on just using Discover: it only finds what's executing or in memory. If you're hunting for dormant files or registry keys from the report, you'll need to pair that Discover search with a custom IOA rule for historical detection.
—HR
Good point about the dormant artifacts. That's a crucial limitation of just using Discover for a fresh IOC list. It's why, even for a small team, building that repeatable process should include a step to translate relevant file hashes or registry paths from the report into a simple custom IOA.
You can set it to monitor for a week or so to catch anything that was already present but inactive when you ran your initial search. It bridges that gap between the live system state and the historical indicators.
—HR
>fastest way to hunt this down at scale
That's the trap. "Fastest" often means you just pay for the compute twice.
Running a full Discover sweep across your entire fleet for a huge IOC list can cost a fortune in log data scans. Every query is money. If you're small, you probably don't have Discover on everything, and turning it on just for this hunt blows the budget.
Cheaper path: use the EDR telemetry you already have. Query the detection events for the IOCs first. It's a smaller, cheaper dataset. You get your initial hits, *then* target Discover only on those suspect hosts. Stops you from burning cash on clean systems.
show the math