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

Roles performed within a team

Regardless of a team's size or purpose, each team will have certain roles that must be fulfilled by the members. If the word roles sounds too strict, then let's call them functions instead. Whatever they are called, the ones listed within this book are generic in nature and should be molded as necessary to fit the needs of the team.

The first question that is normally asked by an employer who is managing the resources is this: Do you really need all of those people? The number of resources provided to the team is something that can be debated and can fluctuate with activity. The roles needed are the same if there are 2 or 10 people on the team.

Seven roles will be required throughout the course of the threat hunt, as listed here:

  • Team lead
  • Host-based analyst
  • Network-based analyst
  • Threat intelligence (TI) analyst
  • Incident responder/security analyst
  • Network administrator
  • Client system/server administrator
  • ...