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

Data pattern of life

The final part in the use and application of the models we've discussed in this and the previous chapter is defining the pattern of life; that is, when did this information become interesting to me and when did it cease to be interesting to me? Understanding that just because something was bad, doesn't necessarily mean that it poses a threat or that it is still bad.

Before we get into this next section, I wanted to say a word about the industry phrase Indicator of Compromise (IoC) and the derivative phrase Indicator of Attack (IoA). IoCs are atomic indicators (IP addresses, file hashes, registry keys, and so on), which are artifacts of a compromise, and IoAs focus more on activities that must be accomplished by an adversary to achieve their campaign objectives (escalation privilege, maintain persistence, stage and exfiltrate data, and so on). Understanding what both IoCs and IoAs are is valuable, from a raw definition as well as where they are each more...