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

Scenario A – internal threat hunt

The team has a prepared location inside the facility to execute the hunt operations from. Network access has been confirmed, as well as power and cooling. The team already has a plan to use SSH to connect to the devices they need to for data gathering and review. As the hunt team does not have the ability to operate out-of-band and must rely on the existing infrastructure to retrieve data from their new sensors, encryption between the devices is a must. The network administrator has used their access to the NOC to get some servers and standalone storage for the team. The equipment set up by the network administrator has data at rest policies applied to it upon writing to disk.

Before starting, the team lead verifies with the SOC and NOC about any of the current collection locations requiring additional security. Legal has negotiated access to the government-connected networks. However, the data stored there must be physically separate from...