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

What to say and what not to say

Before we get into the various types of products and deliverables, we need to discuss the elephant in the room (again) – communication.

The words, pictures, and graphs that the team decides to use have meaning and power beyond what the team intends them to convey. These images and words will be received by an audience that you do not directly interface with and the team will not have the ability to adjust that perception after the fact. The audience you write the report for isn't the only audience that interprets it. The report could be utilized in legal proceedings or leaked to the press. What you produce will be out in a world that is beyond your control.

Real-World Example

After a lengthy threat hunt, the team included a briefing for the executive leadership in their deliverables on everything that was identified and the perceived root causes of any adversarial activity. During this hunt, an intrusion began as a user was compromised...