Falcon Sensor: Lightweight Endpoint Telemetry for Enterprise Detection
CrowdStrike’s agent that watches everything — quietly, persistently, and in real time
What is Falcon Sensor?
It’s a low-footprint endpoint agent that feeds behavioral telemetry to the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Once installed, it observes all relevant activity: process launches, DLL injections, network events, lateral movement, persistence tricks — and sends it to the cloud for correlation, detection, and response.
It’s not an antivirus. It’s not a log shipper. It’s not a firewall.
It’s a sensor — and one job: visibility.
Let’s say a machine gets compromised.
Someone pulls down a PowerShell payload, executes it in-memory, touches LSASS, then reaches out to an IP in Belarus.
With Falcon Sensor on that box?
The timeline, hashes, child processes, network trace, user identity, and MITRE mapping are already in the console — often before the SOC even gets the ticket.
Where It’s Being Used
– Corporate environments where full EDR is required without local scanning engines.
– Cloud VMs (Windows and Linux) that need behavioral visibility with minimal overhead.
– Incident response cases — Falcon Sensor logs activity even after it’s happened.
– Lateral movement detection inside segmented environments.
– Real-time detection of hands-on-keyboard attacks and post-exploitation stages.
Key Characteristics
| Feature | What It Brings in Production Use |
| Kernel-Level Telemetry | Hooks system calls and behaviors at low level — very hard to evade |
| Cloud-Delivered Logic | Detections processed remotely — sensor doesn’t need signature updates |
| Real-Time Uploads | Sends events instantly to the cloud console — searchable within seconds |
| Tiny Resource Footprint | Designed to avoid interference — often <1% CPU |
| Process Tree Awareness | Tracks parent-child relationships, environment context |
| MITRE ATT&CK Integration | Maps observed behavior to known techniques for analysts |
| No Local UI | Invisible to users, zero interaction unless explicitly triggered |
| Tamper Protection | Requires policy or token to disable or uninstall |
| API-Ready Data | Events can be queried via Falcon APIs for SIEM/alerting integrations |
| Cross-Platform | Windows, macOS, Linux — identical data models and behavior detection |
What You Actually Need
– Falcon Console access with deployment token
– Supported OS (Windows 7/10/11, Server, macOS, Linux)
– Admin/root rights on the endpoint
– Internet access to api.crowdstrike.com domains
To install on Linux:
sudo dpkg -i falcon-sensor_<version>.deb
sudo /opt/CrowdStrike/falconctl -s –cid=<customer_id_string>
sudo systemctl start falcon-sensor
Check status:
sudo /opt/CrowdStrike/falconctl -g –cid
sudo systemctl status falcon-sensor
On Windows:
– Run SensorSetup.exe with the provided CID.
– Silent install supported via MSI and GPO.
– No reboot required in most cases.
What Analysts Actually Say
“We caught a hands-on attack within minutes — no signature, no AV alert. Just pure behavior.”
“The agent doesn’t slow things down. We run it even on dev boxes and CI runners.”
“Falcon gave us visibility we didn’t know we were missing. Things like token theft, LOLBins, AD abuse — it shows up clearly now.”
One Thing to Know
Falcon Sensor is tightly integrated with CrowdStrike’s cloud. Without console access, it doesn’t do much.
It’s not for offline detection. It doesn’t produce local logs. It doesn’t let users run scans manually.
But if the goal is real-time visibility with zero friction, on every OS and every workload — this is what it’s made for.
