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

As the team moves throughout the hunt, they're using the processes and procedures they've used for other clients and hunts without issue. CSI is a mature organization, so activities are well documented and easy to share with new employees and prospective clients to get approval. For CSI, procedures are not documented, but tactics and techniques are. Through the training and testing regimen of new employees, they're allowed to determine their own procedures and have to be able to explain them to their peers. This is done to ensure the employee can explain them to future clients as well.

During the early planning phase, these processes and procedures were presented to stakeholders in documents explaining what the engagement would entail. Each section had a header that covered the tactics they would be using and what it would target on a possible threat actor's side. Stakeholders were allowed to ask questions and decide which...