Sigma Transforms Its Cybersecurity with CrowdStrike

Sigma Alimentos is a Mexican multinational food processing and distribution company headquartered in Nuevo León, Mexico. With $8.5 billion in revenue and 46,000 employees, Sigma operates throughout the U.S., Mexico, and Spain through its family of brands.

One subsidiary is a leading U.S. food manufacturer known for its popular packaged meats. With multiple manufacturing facilities and a complex supply chain, it depends on uninterrupted operations to deliver products to customers across the country. However, its cybersecurity posture was struggling to keep up with the demands of modern threats.

Like many organizations, it had historically relied on a patchwork of legacy security solutions that lacked integration and required significant manual oversight. Each time an alert came in, the security team scrambled to investigate, often wasting valuable time chasing false positives. Worse yet, security incidents had begun to disrupt operations, leading to costly downtime. After suffering two security breaches in three years, it became clear a new approach was needed.

In 2017, the subsidiary’s CISO Roberto Garcia saw an opportunity to rethink security from the ground up. Rather than continuing to manage disparate tools, he envisioned a fully integrated security platform. After evaluating several options, the company chose the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform to centralize its endpoint, identity, and cloud security — a successful strategy that its parent company soon adopted as well.

The subsidiary began its transformation with the adoption of CrowdStrike endpoint security via CrowdStrike Falcon® Prevent and CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR for extended detection and response (EDR), deployed on the Falcon platform. Together, these solutions provided advanced protection against malware, exploits, and sophisticated malware-free attacks while delivering deep visibility into endpoint activity across its environment.

Initially deployed as a self-managed solution, CrowdStrike endpoint security enabled the organization to prevent, identify, and contain threats faster. Seeing the opportunity to further streamline operations, it soon adopted CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete Next-Gen MDR, CrowdStrike’s fully managed detection and response service.

Within 90 days, it transitioned to a proactive security posture, guided by the expert team behind Falcon Complete. The managed service offloaded configuration, maintenance, and incident response from the subsidiary’s internal teams, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives.

The deployment soon included other Falcon platform modules for enhanced visibility and security. CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection enabled continuous monitoring of Active Directory, reduced privileged accounts from 600 to fewer than 20, and provided advanced detection of identity-based threats. The integration with Falcon Complete ensured rapid response to suspicious activity, including during penetration tests.

Likewise, CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security delivered visibility into cloud workloads, containers, and compliance violations, supporting the subsidiary’s small but growing cloud footprint. By identifying risky configurations and ensuring compliance, the solution strengthened its overall cloud security posture.

Deploying these protections from the unified Falcon platform gave it both cybersecurity consolidation and better security outcomes. “The Falcon platform gave us the visibility and control we needed to secure every layer of our organization,” Garcia noted.

As its cybersecurity maturity grew, Garcia’s team recognized the value of leveraging threat intelligence to stay ahead of emerging threats. The adoption of CrowdStrike Falcon® Adversary Intelligence marked a significant milestone in its journey by transforming the way it identified and mitigated risks. With access to intelligence on over 250 nation-state and eCrime adversaries, the subsidiary gained critical insights into threat actor tradecraft and techniques.

“Understanding how adversaries operate has been helpful for us,” Garcia explained. “It’s not just about knowing who’s out there, it’s about preparing for how they might target us.”

Recon, part of Falcon Adversary Intelligence, proved particularly valuable. The subsidiary used it to gain real-time visibility into exposed credentials and impersonation attempts on the dark web. Garcia said Recon provides near-instant notifications of exposed accounts, allowing his team to take immediate action before adversaries can exploit the data.

“Recon opened our eyes to vulnerabilities we didn’t even know existed, and it gave us the tools to act immediately,” he said.

Falcon Adversary Intelligence helps in several other ways. It provides automated sandboxing of quarantined files, streamlining the analysis of potential threats. Also, seamless sharing of indicators of compromise through APIs further enhanced the subsidiary’s threat mitigation strategies. The company has shifted from merely reacting to incidents to actively mitigating risks before they materialize, significantly enhancing its overall security posture.

“Falcon Adversary Intelligence makes us proactive,” said Garcia. “We’re no longer playing catch-up, we’re staying ahead of the adversaries.”

Sigma Alimentos soon took notice of the cybersecurity transformation. Across its global footprint, each of its subsidiaries relied on different tools and strategies, creating challenges with inefficiencies, siloed threat management, and inconsistent incident response processes.

“We realized we couldn’t operate as three separate regions with three separate strategies,” said Garcia. “It was time to unify and strengthen our collective defenses.”

Seeing the tangible improvements in security operations and risk reduction at its U.S. subsidiary, Sigma recognized the opportunity to extend these benefits across the enterprise. Today, Sigma deploys CrowdStrike across its 15,000 endpoints and three regions, creating a standardized and resilient cybersecurity framework.

By leveraging the Falcon platform’s comprehensive capabilities, Sigma has reduced incident response times, alleviated operational burdens, and enhanced protection against modern threats. The unified approach has also supported better compliance and improved efficiency across its cloud footprint.

“With CrowdStrike, we’re not just protecting our business, we’re empowering our teams to innovate and stay ahead of whatever comes next,” concluded Garcia.