Table of Contents
- What is the definition of Proactive Threat Hunting?
- Threat Hunting Methodologies
- Threat Hunting Steps
- Where Does Threat Hunting Fit?
What is the definition of Proactive Threat Hunting?
The process of proactively looking for cyber hazards hiding undiscovered in a network is known as threat hunting. Cyber threat hunting scours your surroundings for dangerous actors that have eluded your first endpoint security measures.
An attacker may stay on a network for months after slipping in, silently collecting data, looking for secret material, or obtaining login credentials that will enable them to move laterally throughout the environment.
Once an attacker has successfully evaded detection and an assault has breached an organization’s defences, many businesses lack the advanced detection skills required to prevent advanced persistent threats from staying in the network. As a result, threat hunting is a critical component of any security plan.
Threat hunting is increasingly crucial as businesses strive to keep ahead of the newest cyber dangers and react quickly to any possible assaults.
Threat Hunting Methodologies
Threat hunters believe that adversaries are already present in the system and launch investigations to uncover odd behaviour that may signal the existence of hostile activities. In proactive danger hunting, this investigational initiation usually falls into one of three categories:
1. Hypothesis-driven investigation
Hypothesis-driven investigations are often initiated by a new threat discovered in a vast pool of crowdsourced attack data, providing insights into attackers’ recent strategies, approaches, and processes (TTP). Once a new TTP has been uncovered, threat hunters will investigate if the attacker’s unique actions can be seen in their environment.
2. Based on recognized Indicators of Compromise or Indicators of Attack, conduct an investigation.
This strategy to threat hunting catalogues known IOCs and IOAs linked with new threats uses tactical threat information. Threat hunters then use these as triggers to identify possible covert assaults or continuing malicious activities.
3. Advanced analytics and machine learning research
The third option uses advanced data analysis and machine learning to filter through huge data to spot abnormalities that might indicate hostile activity. These abnormalities become hunting leads, which expert analysts follow up on to discover stealthy dangers.
All three techniques include a human-powered effort to defend an organization’s systems and information by combining threat intelligence resources with modern security technologies.
Threat Hunting Steps
Proactive cyber threat hunting often consists of three steps: a trigger, an investigation, and a resolution.
1: The Trigger
A hunch about a new danger is often the impetus for proactive hunting. A security team, for example, may look for sophisticated threats that employ techniques like file-less malware to circumvent current safeguards. When sophisticated detection systems notice odd activities that may suggest a malicious activity, a trigger directs threat hunters to a particular system or region of the network for additional analysis.
2: Investigation
During the investigation phase, the threat hunter use technologies like EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) to conduct a thorough examination of a system’s possible hostile intrusion. The inquiry will continue until the activity is determined to be benign or a thorough picture of the malicious conduct is produced.
3: Resolution
During the resolution phase, pertinent malicious activity information is sent to operations and security teams to react to the event and minimize dangers. The information obtained regarding both dangerous and benign activities may be fed into automated systems to increase efficacy without further human involvement.
Cyber threat hunters acquire as much information about an attacker’s activities, techniques, and intentions as possible throughout the process. They also evaluate acquired data to identify patterns in an organization’s security environment, eradicate present weaknesses, and forecast future security.
Where Does Threat Hunting Fit?
Threat hunting is a valuable addition to the conventional incident detection, response, and remediation procedure. While security systems scan raw data to create alarms, threat hunting uses queries and automation to derive hunting leads from the same data.
Hunting leads are then reviewed by human threat hunters, who are experienced at detecting signals of enemy activity, which can then be handled using the same pipeline.
