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

Summary

I agree, there was a lot covered in these last two chapters. There are a lot of moving pieces to get a working lab, between the victim machine and the collection and analysis platform. I thought about doing some "figurative hand waving" with a lot of what I have seen in these kinds of kits: "Step 1: Install Elasticsearch; Step 2: Install Windows; Step 3: Profit." I observe those kinds of guides frequently and find that that approach misses a lot of crucial details; so, we went from the ground up, through every step. While that may seem slow for some that are experienced, it's important to get this right or the rest of the book isn't going to be a lot of fun if all you can do is read about how this could work. Hands-on for the win!

In the next chapter, we will configure the systems that will collect our data from the victim machine and store it in Elasticsearch.