Hi everyone — I've been working on a quarterly threat review for our team, and one of the tasks was pulling our top 10 IOCs from CrowdStrike Intel over the last quarter. It's always interesting to see what actually bubbled up as the most relevant to our environment versus what was just noise.
I wanted to share the method I used, because I found the export process a bit clunky initially. Instead of just screenshotting the dashboard, I used the "Create Report" feature in the Intel module, filtered by date and our internal priority tags, and then exported to CSV. I then cleaned up the columns in Excel to focus on the IOC value, type, associated threat actor, and our internal case ID. This made it much easier to slot into our existing threat briefing format.
Has anyone else done something similar? I'm curious if there are better ways to automate this or tie it directly into our SIEM for recurring reports. Also, if you have a different approach for determining "top" IOCs (maybe by severity, prevalence, or false-positive rate), I'd love to compare notes. Sharing these workflows helps us all get more value from the platform.
Looking forward to the discussion.
~ Amy
I'm cost_cutter_99, a finops lead at a 400-person SaaS company. We run CrowdStrike Falcon, and I'm the one who handles the quarterly cost and value reviews, so pulling report data like this falls under my scope.
I've looked at automating IOC reports a couple of ways, mostly to save analyst hours. Here's a breakdown.
1. **CrowdStrike's built-in automation:** You can use their Scheduled Reports to generate that CSV weekly/monthly. But honestly, the real effort is the "clean up the columns" part you mentioned. Their API is more flexible, but building a script to fetch, transform, and dump to your SIEM is still a 5-10 hour initial dev task for an engineer. The benefit is you can filter directly by prevalence count, which is a better "top" metric than just your manual tags.
2. **SIEM-native enrichment:** We tried this. We pipe CrowdStrike logs to our SIEM (Splunk) and built dashboards there. The initial integration took a day, but defining "top IOCs" by count of detections in our environment (not just Intel's global prevalence) was more accurate. The hidden cost is SIEM ingest and compute for those logs. For us, it added about 15% to our Splunk bill, which was about $300 a month extra.
3. **Lightweight script with the API:** I ended up with a Python script that uses the CrowdStrike API, filters by date and type, sorts by *internal_detection_count* (which you can get via another API call), and spits out a clean CSV. It runs weekly in a Lambda. It took me a weekend to build. The win is control; the limitation is you now own a small piece of infra and have to handle API changes.
4. **Third-party workflow tools:** Things like Tines or Splunk Phantom. If you already have them, you can build a workflow that grabs the IOCs, enriches them, and creates the briefing doc. At my last shop, this was a 20-hour project for a security engineer. It's powerful but only worth it if you're already paying for the platform and have the cycles. Vendor support for these integrations varies a lot; we got good help from Tines but had to figure out the CrowdStrike side ourselves.
My pick is the lightweight script if you have any dev resources. It's the most direct path from data to the format you need without paying for more SaaS or bloating your SIEM costs. For a clean recommendation, tell us if you have a security engineer who can own a small script, and what your current monthly SIEM spend is (to see if the enrichment route is viable).
Ah, the classic "hidden cost" reveal. Always shows up after the engineering sprint is done.
So the SIEM route tacks on an extra $300 a month? That's the real "top" metric for FinOps. It's funny how the quest for more accurate data creates its own new cost center that then needs to be justified. I'd be curious what the total hourly cost of those manual reports you're saving actually is, compared to that steady $3,600 a year tail.
Prevalence vs. internal detections is a good point, though. Makes me wonder how many "top" IOCs are just globally common noise that never touched our systems.
Trust but verify – especially the audit log.
Nice, thanks for writing this up! I've been trying to get better at using the Intel module for our own reports. That "Create Report" to CSV trick is way cleaner than my old screenshot method.
Quick question about your process: when you filter by your internal priority tags, are those tags you set up within CrowdStrike itself, or are they imported from somewhere else? I'm trying to standardize how we tag things.
Thanks for sharing your process, Amy. I've seen teams take that cleaned CSV a step further by using a simple Power Query setup in Excel that connects directly to the CrowdStrike API (using a service account with limited permissions, of course). It can refresh on open, so your briefing doc always has the latest data without manual steps each quarter.
On determining "top" IOCs, we started blending internal priority tags with prevalence data from the platform. It's a bit of a manual scoring matrix, but it helps filter out globally common noise that our controls are already blocking. Have you considered weighting false-positive rate into your ranking? We found some high-prevalence IOCs triggered automated responses that blocked legitimate traffic, so that context became crucial for our top ten list. 😅
Your point about tying it to the SIEM is spot on. While automation is great, the overhead user98 mentioned is real. Sometimes the quarterly manual review is the right cadence - it forces that conversation about what "relevant" actually means.
Architect first, buy later