What is Threat Hunting?
Threat hunting, cybersecurity – artistic interpretation.
Threat hunting involves proactive searches throughout networks and datasets to identify threats that may evade existing automated security solutions. It’s a continual search for ‘needles in the haystack’ that other protective measures might have missed. Unlike traditional cybersecurity measures, which are reactive in nature, threat hunting is a proactive technique to uncover, isolate, and neutralize cyber threats before they cause significant damage.
The digital landscape is an ever-evolving environment, with new threats and vulnerabilities emerging every day. Traditional reactive cybersecurity methods, such as firewalls and antivirus software, are insufficient to handle many of these sophisticated attacks. This is where threat hunting comes into play, providing an advanced, proactive approach to cybersecurity that focuses on identifying threats before they can fully infiltrate your systems.
5 Reasons Threat Hunting is the Future of Cybersecurity
Here are a few of the reasons many organizations are adopting threat hunting as a primary cybersecurity strategy. Of course, threat hunting can never operate on its own and must be supplanted by traditional preventive security tools.
Proactive Defense Strategy
As a cyber defender, one of the core advantages of threat hunting is the proactive approach it takes towards cybersecurity. Traditional security measures wait for an alarm or an indicator of compromise (IOC) before they react. On the other hand, threat hunting actively looks for signs of potential threats, often before they can even be detected by automated systems.
The proactive nature of threat hunting allows cybersecurity professionals to stay one step ahead of the attackers. By identifying potential threats in their early stages, defenders can mitigate the damage caused by a cyber attack, often preventing the attack altogether. This proactive defense strategy makes threat hunting an essential tool in the arsenal of any cybersecurity team.
The Need for Advanced Techniques to Counteract Modern Threats
As our digital landscape becomes more complex, so do the threats we face. Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their tactics, utilizing increasingly sophisticated methods to bypass traditional security measures. This has created a need for advanced techniques to counteract these modern threats – techniques like threat hunting.
Traditional security measures, which rely on known signatures or behaviors to detect threats, are often ineffective against modern, sophisticated attacks. Threat hunting, however, goes beyond these known indicators of compromise, utilizing advanced techniques to identify and neutralize threats that may be completely new, unprecedented, or may simple have fallen between the cracks of existing defensive measures
AI and Machine Learning are Supercharging Threat Hunting
Another reason for the rise of threat hunting is the increased utilization of AI and Machine Learning in cybersecurity. These technologies have the potential to revolutionize threat hunting, making it more efficient and effective than ever before.
AI and Machine Learning can automate the process of searching through vast quantities of data, identifying patterns and anomalies that might indicate a threat. This not only increases the speed and efficiency of threat hunting but also makes it possible to uncover threats that would be hard to detect using traditional methods.
Threat Hunting Streamlining Incident Response
In the event of a cyber attack, time is of the essence. The longer it takes to respond to an attack, the more damage can be done. This is where threat hunting can make a real difference.
By identifying threats early on, threat hunting can help streamline the incident response process. Instead of waiting for an attack to occur and then reacting, threat hunting allows organizations to take a proactive approach, identifying and neutralizing threats before they can cause significant damage. This proactive approach can significantly reduce the time it takes to respond to an incident, minimizing the potential damage caused by a cyber attack.
Meeting Regulatory and Compliance Requirements
The last reason for the centrality of threat hunting is that it can help meet increasingly stringent regulatory and compliance requirements that many organizations face.
Regulatory bodies around the world are implementing more strict regulations around data protection and privacy. These regulations often require organizations to take proactive steps to protect their data from cyber threats. Threat hunting, when properly documented, can prove to auditors that these steps are being taken, taking the organization’s security posture to the next level.
Tips for Getting Started with Threat Hunting
Here are a few tips that can help you get started with threat hunting in your organization.
Develop a Clear Understanding of Your Environment
The first and perhaps the most crucial step towards effective threat hunting is developing a clear understanding of your environment. This includes knowing your assets, understanding their purpose, knowing who has access to them, and how they are typically used.
You should conduct a comprehensive inventory of all your assets, both hardware and software. This includes servers, endpoints, databases, network devices, applications, and critical files. It’s also essential to understand the normal behavior of these assets—for example, what is typical network traffic? What is a usual pattern of user behavior? Understanding these norms is crucial in identifying anomalies that could indicate a threat.
In addition, understanding your company’s business processes and workflows can also help in threat hunting. Knowing the usual flow of data, the standard access patterns, and the regular business hours will assist in identifying activities that deviate from the norm. Lastly, a thorough understanding of the technology stack your company uses is also crucial. This includes understanding the operating systems, databases, applications, and network protocols in use.
Assemble a Skilled Threat Hunting Team
Once you have a clear understanding of your environment, the next step is to assemble a skilled team for threat hunting. This team should consist of individuals with diverse skillsets—from network and system administrators to cybersecurity analysts and threat intelligence experts.
The team’s composition should reflect the complexity and diversity of the environment they will be hunting in. For instance, if your organization uses a wide range of technologies, your team should have experts in those specific areas. Similarly, if your organization has a global footprint, your team should have members who understand the specific threats and risks associated with different geographical areas.
It’s also important to ensure that your team has the right mix of strategic and tactical skills. Strategic skills are necessary for understanding the bigger picture, planning the hunt, and interpreting the results. On the other hand, tactical skills are essential for the actual hunting – analyzing data, identifying anomalies, and conducting investigations.
Leverage High Quality Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence is a critical component of effective threat hunting. It provides the necessary context, insights, and actionable information that can help identify, understand, and mitigate cyber threats.
High-quality threat intelligence can provide information about various threat actors, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), indicators of compromise (IOCs), and other relevant information. This information can help your threat hunting team identify potential threats, understand their possible impact, and devise effective strategies to mitigate them.
Implement Advanced Security Tools and Technologies
While the human element is crucial in threat hunting, it’s equally important to leverage advanced security tools and technologies. These tools can significantly enhance your team’s capabilities, enabling them to conduct more effective and efficient hunts.
These tools can range from advanced security information and event management (SIEM) systems, intrusion detection systems (IDS), endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, to advanced analytics and machine learning tools. These tools can help in collecting and analyzing large volumes of data, identifying anomalies, and generating alerts for potential threats.
However, it’s important to ensure that these tools are properly configured and calibrated to your environment. This includes setting up the right rules, thresholds, and alerts to ensure that the tools can effectively identify potential threats without generating too many false positives.
Conduct Regular and Structured Hunts
You should conduct regular hunts based on a predefined schedule. This could be weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, depending on your organization’s risk profile and the resources available. Regular hunting enables you to identify and mitigate threats in a timely manner, reducing the potential impact on your organization.
These hunts should be structured and based on a clear methodology. This includes defining the scope of the hunt, identifying the key objectives, determining the data sources to be analyzed, defining the analysis techniques to be used, and setting up a process for documenting and reporting the findings.
Establish a Response Plan for Detected Threats
Lastly, it’s crucial to establish a response plan for the threats detected during the hunts. This plan should outline the steps to be taken to investigate, validate, contain, and remediate the threats.
The response plan should be clear, actionable, and should define the roles and responsibilities of all the stakeholders. It should also include a communication plan to ensure timely and effective communication with all the relevant parties, including the top management, IT staff, and potentially affected users.
In conclusion, threat hunting is a critical activity that can significantly enhance your organization’s cybersecurity posture. By following these tips, you can embark on your threat hunting journey, proactively identifying, understanding, and mitigating cyber threats.
Author Bio: Gilad David Maayan
Gilad David Maayan is a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Imperva, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Check Point, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership. Today he heads Agile SEO, the leading marketing agency in the technology industry.