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

Data collection mindsets

There are three typical mindsets when it comes to how a team plans on collecting data during a threat hunt as well as the general day-to-day defense of a network. They are as follows:

  • Input-driven: Collect everything possible. If it has logs, then collect them and store them somewhere. The initial deployment of this method is low-effort as it just requires the added step of collecting existing logging. The downside of this mindset is that a defender can quickly be overloaded with information that does not matter.
  • Output-driven: Collect and store only specific data that is known to the team and that they care about. This is a very tailored approach and requires the defender to know what to look for. While it is easy for an analyst to digest this method, they will immediately miss anything that is unknown to them without the ability to go back and retrieve it. This means if an incident responder or hunt analyst needs to review data that is not there...