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 B – external threat hunt

CSI has the approval to connect directly to the IT network with their devices. As previously discussed, this will include utilizing technologies such as VPN, SSH, or HTTPS to connect to endpoints. The hunt team will further protect the network by utilizing a dedicated firewall appliance between the analyst network and the client network.

The client asked if CSI would be able to not just clear the IT network, which includes the OT control network, but the OT network itself. CSI threat hunters have no experience in OT and made it clear they would be just as big a threat on that network as a malicious actor. The team did provide alternate teams that are experienced in hunting on OT networks, which the stakeholders could engage in the future.

Because the teams are connecting directly, there's less bandwidth available for network data to flow continuously to the hunt team. This was discovered in planning and will require the hunt team...