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

Profiling data

This means understanding what data is in your environment, and more importantly, how the things in your environment are expected to behave. One of the results of data that is structured into a uniform format (the Elastic Common Schema, which we'll discuss later) and stored together, is that it allows you to profile data to better inform your collection, analysis, and response strategies.

Figure 2.2 is a quick example of some transport layer security (TLS) data. It presents a lot of data at once, but it highlights how you can view like data together to profile how it should be behaving. In this figure, we see JA3 client fingerprints, sorted by the host operating system, and the IP address of the TLS session:

Figure 2.2 – TLS data profile by JA3 fingerprint, OS, and IP address example

Understanding your data is paramount to being able to identify abnormalities. The human brain does this really well through the use of visuals, so the ability to visualize...