Complete newbie here - what's the first report I should run?

Alright, let’s cut through the marketing fluff. You’ve just gotten access to CrowdStrike Intel, the dashboard is staring back at you with a frankly overwhelming number of widgets, graphs, and threat actor names that sound like rejected metal bands. You’re probably thinking, “Great, I have this intel superpower… do I just… click on everything?”

Don’t. You’ll just end up down a rabbit hole of Chinese APT group profiles and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing.

As a newbie, your goal isn’t to write a thesis on FIN7’s latest TTPs. Your goal is to get an immediate, tangible *feel* for what this tool can tell you about *your* environment. You need a report that connects the giant global threat database to the stuff you actually have on your network.

So, skip the “Trending Malware” feed for now. The very first report you should run is the **Intel Watchlist Report**.

Here’s why:

* **It’s Actionable from Day One:** This report automatically cross-references CrowdStrike’s threat intel (malware hashes, attacker tool signatures, malicious domains/IPs) against the detection events in *your* Falcon console. Instead of reading abstract reports, you’re seeing: "Here are the known-bad things that have *actually* touched your systems in the last 7 days."
* **It Does the Heavy Lifting for You:** You’re not crafting complex queries yet. You’re just telling it a time window and letting the system do the correlation. The output is a simple list of detections with the intel context bolted right on.
* **It Answers the “So What?” Question:** Every entry will show you the IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) and, crucially, link them to the adversary groups or malware families behind them. You go from "we blocked a weird hash" to "we blocked a payload associated with Lazarus Group, and here’s their typical attack chain."

**How to think about the results:**

* If the report comes back empty? Good! It’s a baseline. It means no *known* IOCs from CrowdStrike’s premium intel library were found in your recent detections.
* If it has entries? Don’t panic. Look at the severity and the context. Was it blocked? Was it just a web call to a malicious IP that was prevented? The report gives you the starting point for your investigation, already enriched.

This one report bridges the gap between “the world is on fire” and “here is a specific ember in our parking lot.” It turns you from a passive consumer of threat bulletins into someone actively hunting for connections in their own data.

After you’ve lived with that for a few days, *then* you can start playing with the Adversary Universe deep-dives or building custom IOC searches. But start here. Trust me.

chloe