Cyber Threat Hunting

Threat hunting is the practice of proactively searching for cyber threats that are lurking undetected in a network. Cyber threat hunting digs deep to find malicious actors in your environment that have slipped past your initial endpoint security defenses.

After sneaking in, an attacker can stealthily remain in a network for months as they quietly collect data, look for confidential material, or obtain login credentials that will allow them to move laterally across the environment.

Once an adversary is successful in evading detection and an attack has penetrated an organization’s defenses, many organizations lack the advanced detection capabilities needed to stop the advanced persistent threats from remaining in the network. That’s why threat hunting is an essential component of any defense strategy.

Threat Hunting Methodologies

Threat hunters assume that adversaries are already in the system, and they initiate an investigation to find unusual behavior that may indicate the presence of malicious activity. In proactive threat hunting, this initiation of investigation typically falls into three main categories:

1. Hypothesis-driven investigation

Hypothesis-driven investigations are often triggered by a new threat that’s been identified through a large pool of crowdsourced attack data, giving insights into attackers’ latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP). Once a new TTP has been identified, threat hunters will then look to discover if the attacker’s specific behaviors are found in their own environment.

2. An investigation based on known Indicators of Compromise or Indicators of Attack

This approach to threat hunting involves leveraging tactical threat intelligence to catalog known IOCs and IOAs associated with new threats. These then become triggers that threat hunters use to uncover potential hidden attacks or ongoing malicious activity.

3. Advanced analytics and machine learning investigations

The third approach combines powerful data analysis and machine learning to sift through a massive amount of information in order to detect irregularities that may suggest potential malicious activity. These anomalies become hunting leads that are investigated by skilled analysts to identify stealthy threats.

All three approaches are a human-powered effort that combines threat intelligence resources with advanced security technology to proactively protect an organization’s systems and information. For more on cyber threat monitoring.