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

Widget Maker's team started compiling activities they wished to conduct during the hunt early on in the planning phase. These were gleaned from online sources (for example, https://www.sans.org/white-papers) and in the individual training and studying team members had done on their own. The team lead developed a template to start recording all these activities so that they could be standardized. However, there wasn't enough time between when this collection and documentation started, and the hunt needed to start.

The MOA that was shared between the stakeholders and the team included general tactics the hunt team would take, and from that selection, a few were explicitly approved, forming the basis for pre-approved actions the team could take. All other activities had to be presented to the team lead and get approved before being allowed to be conducted on the network. That approval process was not documented in the MOA, and during...