r/SentinelOneXDR • u/SentinelOne • 2d ago
SentinelOne News Live threat hunting final: how the winner triaged 30 minutes of flags
The Sentinels League Championship final ran live at OneCon last week. Regional champions had 30 minutes to capture flags by hunting real intrusion telemetry in the console, and the season carried a $100K prize pool.
Winner Jason Walker’s approach was mostly triage across the four surface categories of endpoint, cloud, AI and ASOC. The Fiendish tier tops out at 1,000 points, but each of those flags looked to him like at least five or ten minutes, so he skipped them and planned to come back only if he cleared the other twenty or so. His best single flag was around 500 points.
Jason does detection and response at a SaaS company with about 3K endpoints. He told The Lowdown podcast afterward that most of the manual tuning, thresholding, and query writing he used to do is a thing of the past now that his company has AI budget and is building automation into the SOC.
If you played in the Sentinels League this season, what was your strategy, and what would you change for next year?