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 depreciation life cycle

An important part of defining a pattern of life for data is understanding how to handle transitioning something from "important" to "unimportant" or more specifically, a path to go from being "very important" to "less important."

The process to transition data has a few different names and I've distilled them down into the three most prevalent in order of concept, action, and process:

  • Indicator decay (concept)
  • Shunning (action)
  • Deprecation pipeline (process)

Indicator decay

Decaying indicators is the concept or idea that indicators have a shelf life and must move from "top-priority" alerting to a lower threat or confidence. If every indicator stays at the same level of threat, responders and hunters will eventually be analyzing the entire internet because, while slight hyperbole, almost every atomic indicator will be flagged as a threat at some point.

The idea is that an indicator...