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

Ways to organize a team

As with many things in threat hunting, a team's organization will be dependent upon many different factors. Some organizations have a rigid structure mandated from the top down on how project teams will be organized. Some might have certain requirements and priorities that give extra flexibility when forming a team. Regardless of whether a team is coming in as a third party or organic to an organization, certain criteria must be taken into account.

When organizing a team, keep in mind that you can combine roles and responsibilities. If you decide to combine functions, walk through the impacts that the decision will have and ensure it is something that the team can work with.

For example, we can look at what would happen if we had a single team member acting as both a host-based analyst and a server administrator. This would result in an individual that is expected to both utilize and maintain the tools that the team employs. When a part of the hunt...