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

Summary

Failure is common and should be expected – strive to not fail the same way twice. Feedback after the hunt is critical in allowing the team to grow and in their level of effectiveness. Direct and open feedback is needed to allow this to happen. Once items have been identified for improvement with applicable actions, the lead will need to follow up to ensure that they take root.

Some of the items in this book might be concepts that are contrary to how your current team or organization operates. The simple act of identifying what went wrong and then spending resources to fix it might be contrary to your current leadership methodology. Does this mean that the current team is ineffective and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up? No.

This entire book centered around a few key concepts and then expounded upon them in various ways. Identify what can positively fit in your current structure and then grow it from there. Remember that communication is central to everything...