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

Your lab architecture

If you're going to build a threat hunting lab, it's best to plan out all of the moving pieces, how they will interact, and what you're going to do with the data.

While there are hardware costs, the software for the lab that we're going to be building costs only one thing: your time.

For this lab, we'll utilize a few main components, as follows:

  • A hypervisor
  • Victim machines
  • The Elastic Stack

As mentioned in the Technical requirements section, you will need a total of 12 GB of RAM, 6 CPU cores, and a 70 GB HDD that can be dedicated to the lab. Some cuts can be made, but I would consider this to be the minimum for a functional lab.

Before we continue, having built several hundred (maybe thousand) VMs and various other interconnected systems and environments, I've learned to embrace simplicity where applicable. For every lab I build, all of my usernames, service accounts, API accounts, and passwords are the same...