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 11: Documentation

If it has not been clear thus far in this book, communication is an exceedingly important concept to understand at this point. Communication is key at each step of a threat hunt. If any member of the team and organization fails to effectively communicate, then they can cause the entire team and organization to incur a penalty, leading to a potential threat-hunt failure.

Communication in the short term can be accomplished in many different forms. However, long-term communication—for example, an understanding that will last more than an hour—needs to be recorded for future reference. Take to heart the following rule: If it isn't written down, then there is no evidence that it did or did not occur. This applies to everyone: threat-hunt team members, individuals in leadership roles, and organizational stakeholders.

While there are a large number of potential documentation areas that a team would want to document, things such as a daily...