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

Why do you want to conduct threat hunts?

Moving beyond organizational priorities and regulatory adherence, there are additional reasons why conducting threat hunts is extremely beneficial. From a business perspective, a cyber threat hunt can lead to a quick win for cybersecurity leadership due to reducing the number of risks that are unknowingly accepted by managers, decreasing the time the Security Operations Center (SOC) spends searching through false positive alerts, and saving money due to mitigating vulnerabilities before a breach. 20 years ago, a business might have been able to get away with having a minimal, if any, computer footprint. Today, not utilizing computers in business is impossible to do, ensuring that a threat actor's target will always be present. It is not possible to completely obstruct threat actors wanting to exploit those targets because those threat actors are completely outside of organizational control and not all targets are known. The only way to...