Faster Attacks Demand Faster Action
The security problem is no longer just one of scale and scope. It is one of speed.
Defenders are responsible for an expanding attack surface across endpoint, identity, cloud, SaaS, AI, and unmanaged infrastructure, while adversaries move across those domains with increasing speed. AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, exploitation, reconnaissance, and interactive intrusion activity, compressing the time security teams have to understand what is happening and respond.
At the same time, the threat intelligence market remains fragmented. Forrester notes that most providers address only a subset of threat intelligence use cases, often forcing enterprises to combine multiple solutions to achieve the visibility and capabilities they need.
That fragmentation creates an incomplete picture. When adversary intelligence, external risk, telemetry, exposure, and hunting context live across separate systems and providers, security teams are left stitching together pieces of the threat before they can act.
What they need is a comprehensive view that brings those signals together so they can understand what matters to their environment and act with the speed the threat demands.
Highest in Current Offering: Platform-Native Intelligence for Deeper Context
CrowdStrike received the highest Current Offering score in the evaluation.
Forrester identifies CrowdStrike’s strength as its platform-native intelligence, powered by proprietary endpoint telemetry that external vendors cannot access through partnerships or integrations. It also describes CrowdStrike’s deep and dark web coverage as extensive and highly contextualized.
CrowdStrike combines that telemetry with original adversary intelligence, incident response insights, CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary OverWatch™ threat hunting, malware analysis, infrastructure collection, and deep and dark web sources.
This combination connects what CrowdStrike knows about the adversary with what is happening inside the customer environment. Instead of treating intelligence as a separate stream of information, CrowdStrike can connect adversaries, infrastructure, malware, vulnerabilities, exposures, and customer activity to help teams understand what matters and where action is required.
The scorecard reinforces this breadth. CrowdStrike received the highest scores possible in 15 criteria, rated 5 out of 5.
Top Score in Threat Hunting and Vulnerability Intelligence Criteria
Two areas stand out in particular.
CrowdStrike was the only vendor evaluated to receive a 5 out of 5 in the Threat Hunting criterion. CrowdStrike believes Forrester’s written assessment reinforces that score, identifying CrowdStrike’s Threat Intelligence Hunt Agent as a standout differentiator and recognizing its comprehensive approach through hunting guides.
See CrowdStrike’s Hunt Agent in action:
CrowdStrike was also the only vendor to receive a 5 out of 5 in the Vulnerability Intelligence criterion.
Together, the results reinforce a core part of the CrowdStrike approach: Intelligence should not stop at describing the threat. It should help defenders identify what is exploitable, understand where adversary activity is occurring, prioritize what matters, and move quickly to action.
That connection between intelligence, exposure, and hunting becomes increasingly important as adversary timelines compress.
Highest in Strategy: Building the Agentic SOC
CrowdStrike also received the highest score in the Strategy category of the evaluation.
Forrester recognizes “CrowdStrike’s vision is to make Threat AI the decision-making core of the agentic security operations center (SOC) by unifying exposure management, vulnerability prioritization, attack surface management, and threat intelligence.” Forrester also cites strong R&D investment, roadmap initiatives, a broad security portfolio, an extensive partner ecosystem, and an active practitioner community as factors positioning CrowdStrike well to execute on that vision.
CrowdStrike believes this vision reflects a broader shift in how we think about threat intelligence.
Threat intelligence cannot remain a separate research function that simply gives analysts more information to process. In an environment where adversaries increasingly operate at machine speed, intelligence has to help do the work.
CrowdStrike’s Threat AI strategy is centered around purpose-built agents that investigate, analyze, hunt, connect context, prioritize, and drive action across security workflows. The goal is to compress the defensive timeline while creating more capacity in some of the highest-skill and hardest-to-staff areas of security operations.
That approach is increasingly important as the market evolves. Forrester notes that “most vendors prioritize either AI-driven innovation or feature enhancement, while only a handful maintain a balanced approach across both. CrowdStrike’s strategy is designed to do both: advance AI capabilities while continuing to strengthen the intelligence, workflows, and platform capabilities they depend on.
Seeing the Full Picture
Forrester’s evaluation reinforces what mature security organizations increasingly require from threat intelligence: not more disconnected data, but a comprehensive view of the adversary, the organization’s environment, and the exposures that connect the two.
For CrowdStrike, the highest score in the Current Offering category reflects what the company delivers today. Highest in the Strategy category reflects where we believe threat intelligence needs to go next.
Together, they reinforce a simple idea: Defenders need the full picture, with the intelligence and AI to understand what matters and act at the speed of the threat.
Read The Forrester Wave™: External Threat Intelligence Service Providers, Q3 2026 to learn why CrowdStrike was named a Leader and received the highest scores in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.
Additional Resources
- Learn more about CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations threat intelligence and threat hunting.
- Tune in to the Adversary Universe podcast, where CrowdStrike reveals the threat actors behind the latest cyberattacks.
- Read about CrowdStrike being named a Leader in the inaugural Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cyberthreat Intelligence Technologies.
- See how CrowdStrike performed in other industry analyst reports.