CrowdStrike Falcon Reviews

We use this product for endpoint security and threat remediation.

The fact that this is a cloud-native solution that provides us with flexibility and always-on protection is absolutely important, especially with a good majority of our staff working remotely, now.

We've had security incidents that occurred and within a matter of just a couple of minutes, they were completely remediated and fixed and we didn't even have to think about it. We just got the report after the fact.

Falcon's ability to prevent breaches is excellent. It's affected us in that we haven't had any downtime as a result of breaches or any malware or anything like that. Ultimately, it's given us a lot of our time back. On the IT side, this is at least five to ten hours per week. On the user side, it is probably more.

Our main use case was looking for an endpoint solution that was able to follow our users anywhere. We have over 52,000 employees, and a majority of our people work in various places. Many employees are not in an office every day: They are at a client's sites, some work at home, some are traveling, etc. We really needed something that would give us visibility no matter where and when an employee was working.

It has improved the way that we function by giving visibility to machines that we could not see before. With our previous product, you had to be VPN'd and connected to our network. Now, we can see alerts when people are just working at home. For example, they may have clicked on something that may be malicious, now we can take action and stop things from getting worse at the end of the day with its level of visibility. We have also seen installing CrowdStrike has a lot less resource issues versus what our previous solution had on local machines.

It is very important that our security solutions are cloud-native as continue to grow our company. I have been here for almost three years and we were 40,000 employees then, and we are over 52,000 now three years later. For us, the cloud has been important because we don't have to worry about infrastructure, connectivity, or other things like that to grow our business.

Even as we had to pivot with the pandemic to more employees working from home, we have been able to maintain the same level of security visibility. One of the big concerns for management when the pandemic stated was how we maintain security asking, "What do we have to change for security?" and it was nothing, "Let people go home. Let them work from wherever they need to." We had already taken the remote working ability into our security model. Our security operations did not change anything when employees pivoted from working at client sites (or in offices) to working at home.

As long as the machine is connected to the Internet, and CrowdStrike is running, then it will be on and we will have visibility; no VPNing in or making some type of network connection. CrowdStrike always there and running in the background; for us, that is big. We wanted something that could give us data as long as the machines connected to the Internet and be almost invisible to the employees.

Having this type of security operations gives our management a level of comfort. We know we have ransomware protection and there are automatic actions that will happen to keep those incidents from spreading. As things like SolarWinds or the Microsoft Exchange issues have come out, we have been able to use the CrowdStrike logging to do look backs through the logs that we have been maintaining for over a year to see if there were any indicators of compromise that previously occurred before this was known issue. This has been great for us to be able to report to various management. even if we may have been running a vulnerable version of this for a period of time, e.g., like the SolarWinds software.

It is currently our antivirus and EDR platform that we use to export incidents to our SIEM and automation platform, SOAR. We use Demisto for our SOAR.

The solution is fully deployed in our organization. We are primarily Windows. There are four major hospital sites with a couple thousand endpoints each. We probably have 600 remote workers due to COVID-19. I would probably say there are 7,000 VDIs inside of Citrix. Then, the rest are probably small clinical sites with no more than 50 to 80 people at each one. They make up the bulk of the rest, and probably 99 percent of that is Windows or server-based. We only have maybe 30 Macintoshes in the whole system and about as many Linuxen.

We are using Windows agent 618.

It talks to a lot of our other systems. It allows us to correlate data between our firewalls. This way, we can connect whether network activity is relating to an endpoint detection for faster correlation. It provides more data about the endpoint quicker than if we were to go out to the endpoint and collect that data manually. In general, I see that it speeds up our playbooks pretty dramatically, as far as our workflow.

We have what we call our phishing playbook. It is an all-in-one, where an email comes into the organization, a user reports it to us, it comes into our automation platform, and then it kicks off a whole bunch of other stuff. For the phishing playbook (which does have a malware component to it) to go out to all the individual tools, that could have taken two and a half hours for it to run the entire phishing book manually, going to all those individual pieces. Now, we can have one done in 15 minutes. The phishing playbook is a catch-all that has multiple systems in there too. As far as collecting data from many different parts, it speeds that up. In general, we have noticed time savings. 

I would give them probably about as high as I would be willing to give any organization. I would give them an eight out of 10, as far as their effectiveness, for preventing breaches. In general, we feel more secure knowing that we are not relying on multiple different technologies to provide a different kind of protection. We were using a couple other different pieces of software to do a portion of what CrowdStrike is doing for us. We are getting a more comprehensive protection, which is good.

We like the ability that if there is an issue at a third-party clinic that is affiliated with us in some way, then we can go in there quickly and install our agent, protecting them if something were to happen. For example, we had at doctor's offices where there were phishing incidents, then we went in there and installed the CrowdStrike agent. 

The Insight feature is one we found the most useful. It does behavior-based analysis and gives us the most appropriate information.

The initial setup was easy.

It's pretty stable.

The scalability is good.

Most organizations are currently looking for a scheduled scan to meet their compliance needs. Other players like Symantec and Trend Micro, FireEye, et cetera, are still providing the signature-based regular scheduled scans also, which is not available in CrowdStrike. That is one parameter that we feel should be there in CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is only working on the dynamic or the files under execution. CrowdStrike is not scanning the static files.

The product could be more accurate in terms of performance.

We'd like to have a single-click recovery option. With some machines getting corrupted by malware, we need an easy way to start with a blank slate if things happen. That one feature should be there in the EDR.

I am currently using CrowdStrike Falcon as an EDR, which is integrated with SIEM. We also work in a real-time environment with the product. As a Falconist, I perform investigation actions on it. There are three different kinds of alerts I deal with: one based purely on IOCs, another process-oriented IOA, and those based on machine learning alerts. This is what I work on, and it is actually a good tool. It has multiple features, including real-time connection to the RTR environment, allowing direct remote host connection through CrowdStrike. I have multiple options like host search and event search, enabling me to do everything I need. It's a comprehensive package. It's a challenging tool to explore, but once accustomed to it, it is quite excellent.

Obviously, when checking in the SIEM, not all logs are available. In CrowdStrike, unlike SIEM, actions are clearly defined. For example, a regular AV like Symantec might indicate a file was quarantined or failed to quarantine, but in CrowdStrike, I can verify the action. As an incident response analyst, I can use CrowdStrike to perform actions like directly wiping a file from a host if given access. I can investigate by accessing the customer's host based on the RTR environment and utilize host search to know details for the past seven days, including logins, processes, file installations, malicious processes, and network connections. Event search also allows for detailed investigations, showing accessed files and remote installations.

The following is a list of use cases that were tested and evaluated against Crowd Strike along with different competitors.

1 - Execution of Fileless Ransomware - The test was conducted using PowerShell script execution, the script was executed using privileges rights and it was successful. Although all the preventive controls were enabled in the CS falcon dashboard, CS falcon had raised a red flag regarding fileless execution, however, the moment it let us know our system got encrypted.

2 - Uploading large volume of Data over the cloud - Using customized script in the USB, a test was conducted to copy (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .png, .jpg, .pdf, .txt, .rtf) files from the system. It performs a copy operation from the whole disk and creates a password-protected .zip file in APPDATA of the complete files, once the protected file is created it then checks the internet connectivity. As soon as the script finds connectivity with 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4. it starts sending the protected .ZIP file over its CnC cloud.

3 - Disabling of CS Falcon Agent - I have conducted a test to disable the Falcon agent from the Windows-based OS. The agent was successfully disabled by booting up another OS and renaming of agent files from the system.

4 - Perform Privilege Task in Crowd strike - CS roles have some additional privileges. While performing host containment, it has the ability to perform the following operations without informing the user: 

* Host Containment 
* Isolating the host from the network;
* Copying data from the host machine into the CS cloud;

Considering the above situation it may cause a breach of user privacy due to which user can file a complaint against InfoSec team.

The solution fits well in the organization and took out valuable output as expected from Endpoint Detection and Response solution.

This solution supersedes the requirement of an Endpoint Protection solution. The cost of EPP can be saved while using EDR.

One good thing is the active association of the Crowd Strike team in terms of support and coordination. 

Features that require further evaluation include:

Let's take an example of ten machines that require CS falcon agent installation. Apart from agent compatibility and ease of installation, one of the most important areas is the network bandwidth which would require whenever an agent updates the server through the cloud. 

An estimated network bandwidth utilization takes 0.4 MB/hour for a single machine to update its probes over the cloud. If we estimate the total working hours in our case it is eight hours, the formula would be 0.4 X 8 = 3.2 MB per host per day is the data uploading requirement on the cloud. It is highly recommended to assess a number of agents and the network bandwidth requirements.

CrowdStrike Falcon is used as an endpoint detection and response platform. It's basically an antivirus solution. It is deployed on all the endpoints, including workstation servers, et cetera.

We previously had another solution. However, it was a combination of signature-based and anomaly-based detection methods. When we implemented CrowdStrike in our organization, it helped us minimize the critical gap where, in some cases, we could not identify malicious behavior.

We are using it for endpoint protection, as well as for cloud security coverage. It includes monitoring all our critical servers and endpoint devices. We also design workflows for anomaly behavior detection using machine learning techniques for anything malicious or abnormal. We monitor everything suspicious. We either design the workflows or use CrowdStrike to monitor any new detections and anomaly behaviors, as well as do vulnerability management.

The best benefit of CrowdStrike Falcon is 99% MITRE coverage. It detects suspicious or undetected activities on the system and provides protection for zero-day vulnerabilities. If there is a sudden rise in CPU consumption or abnormal storage use, it helps us by creating a ticket, allowing us to investigate any abnormal behavior present. We can look into the machine and investigate. It reduces the false negatives common with other technologies.

The real-time response helps with MTTR. We achieve faster detection and response times.

It helped prevent breaches. In the past, there was abnormal consumption of RAM along with CPU on a server. It also started communicating with other subnets. CrowdStrike Falcon triggered an alert. We did our investigation and found that we had ransomware. We successfully mitigated it.