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 Dashboard app

Dashboards are a great way in which to display multiple visualizations at once. Dashboards in Kibana, like almost everything else, are interactable. This means that you can hover over them and apply filters. Additionally, we can use the visualizations we created earlier to associate the data together. For example, using dashboards and filters, we can filter out a specific domain and view the HTTP, TLS, and DNS data all at once.

To get started, click on the hamburger menu and select Dashboards. From there, you'll see several dashboards that are included with the various Beats that we're using. For example, the Packetbeat Overview ECS dashboard is a fantastic example of what you can do with visualizations and dashboards.

That said, let's create three dashboards, one each for HTTP, TLS, and DNS traffic. Click on Create dashboard, and then click on the Add from Library button. Here are all the saved searches and visualizations. Change the type to Visualizations...