Book Image

Threat Hunting with Elastic Stack

By : Andrew Pease
5 (1)
Book Image

Threat Hunting with Elastic Stack

5 (1)
By: Andrew Pease

Overview of this book

Threat Hunting with Elastic Stack will show you how to make the best use of Elastic Security to provide optimal protection against cyber threats. With this book, security practitioners working with Kibana will be able to put their knowledge to work and detect malicious adversary activity within their contested network. You'll take a hands-on approach to learning the implementation and methodologies that will have you up and running in no time. Starting with the foundational parts of the Elastic Stack, you'll explore analytical models and how they support security response and finally leverage Elastic technology to perform defensive cyber operations. You’ll then cover threat intelligence analytical models, threat hunting concepts and methodologies, and how to leverage them in cyber operations. After you’ve mastered the basics, you’ll apply the knowledge you've gained to build and configure your own Elastic Stack, upload data, and explore that data directly as well as by using the built-in tools in the Kibana app to hunt for nefarious activities. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build an Elastic Stack for self-training or to monitor your own network and/or assets and use Kibana to monitor and hunt for adversaries within your network.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Threat Hunting, Analytical Models, and Hunting Methodologies
4
Section 2: Leveraging the Elastic Stack for Collection and Analysis
11
Section 3: Operationalizing Threat Hunting

The Elastic Common Schema

In the previous chapters, most notably in Chapter 7, Using Kibana to Explore and Visualize Data, we discussed that the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) is a data model, developed by Elastic and their community, to describe common fields that are used when storing data in Elasticsearch. ECS defines specific field names, organizations, and data types for each field that is stored in Elasticsearch. While ECS is an open source model and is frequently contributed to by the Elastic community, it is maintained by Elastic.

Later, we'll see why ECS is strongly encouraged but not mandatory for storing data in Elasticsearch. When data cannot be stored in ECS, data providers can use general ECS guidelines (Elastic, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/ecs-guidelines.html) to name and structure custom fields. This helps uniformly structure fields that are not in ECS.

While ECS is a data model, it is also an ideology that data should be stored uniformly so that...