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

Query languages

Within Kibana, we can use one of three languages to query our data – with those being Lucene, KQL, and the EQL.

As mentioned in Chapter 3, Introduction to the Elastic Stack, Elasticsearch is built upon Lucene, which is a search engine library written in Java. However, before we dive too deeply into Lucene, it should be noted that this language is generally unused in newer versions of Kibana barring a few exceptions, notably, when searching using a regular expression (regex). A regex is written to identify specific characters in a string. They can be simple searches, such as finding a specific word or phrase, or more complex searches, such as finding the sixth word of a sentence but only if the sentence starts with the word "The" and ends with "?".

Because of this, we'll discuss Lucene in a bit more detail and explore a useful threat hunting example using regex. However, please note that we'll be using KQL for almost all of our...