When 50–80% of your SOC’s alerts are noise and stealthy malware keeps slipping past signatures, the difference between a contained incident and a headline breach often comes down to how quickly your analysts can answer three simple questions about every suspicious file. This talk introduces a practical, repeatable framework for SOC analysts and threat hunters to evaluate any suspicious file using three critical questions that go beyond a simple “malicious or not” verdict. As malware grows stealthier and alert volumes climb, teams struggle with vague detections, inconsistent triage, and high false‑positive rates that waste precious response time.