Book Image

The Foundations of Threat Hunting

By : Chad Maurice, Jeremy Thompson, William Copeland
Book Image

The Foundations of Threat Hunting

By: Chad Maurice, Jeremy Thompson, William Copeland

Overview of this book

Threat hunting is a concept that takes traditional cyber defense and spins it onto its head. It moves the bar for network defenses beyond looking at the known threats and allows a team to pursue adversaries that are attacking in novel ways that have not previously been seen. To successfully track down and remove these advanced attackers, a solid understanding of the foundational concepts and requirements of the threat hunting framework is needed. Moreover, to confidently employ threat hunting in a business landscape, the same team will need to be able to customize that framework to fit a customer’s particular use case. This book breaks down the fundamental pieces of a threat hunting team, the stages of a hunt, and the process that needs to be followed through planning, execution, and recovery. It will take you through the process of threat hunting, starting from understanding cybersecurity basics through to the in-depth requirements of building a mature hunting capability. This is provided through written instructions as well as multiple story-driven scenarios that show the correct (and incorrect) way to effectively conduct a threat hunt. By the end of this cyber threat hunting book, you’ll be able to identify the processes of handicapping an immature cyber threat hunt team and systematically progress the hunting capabilities to maturity.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Preparation – Why and How to Start the Hunting Process
9
Part 2: Execution – Conducting a Hunt
14
Part 3: Recovery – Post-Hunt Activity

Chapter 8: Defending the Defenders

Now that all of the planning is done, it is a great time to remind everyone on the threat hunting team why they are there. At the most basic level, the goal of the team is to negatively impact a threat actor's day by disrupting, impeding, or completely negating their activities and potentially preventing the bad guys from achieving their long-term goals. This could mean impacting those threat actors with millions in lost revenue by removing accesses that could have taken years to establish or blocking the phishing email lures that were just discovered. With a hunt, you could find legacy threats that are still valid or a new threat.

At a minimum, the data the team will be accessing and recording must be protected as much as possible. A legal phrase for this situation is ensuring the threat hunt team is executing their due diligence. A simple way to evaluate the data storage requirements for a threat hunt is that it's bad if the customer...