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

Communicating with the adversary

You will be communicating with the adversary whether you intend to or not. Depending upon the intended adversary the hunt team is searching for, those individuals could be active on the network monitoring communication. For many advanced adversaries, it is not a big deal to pause their operations and go quiet for 3 to 6 months while they wait out a defense team. A targeted hunt is normally employed for a very finite amount of time as resources within an organization will be limited.

In all but the largest of organizations, resources will normally not be available to employ even a single individual full time to continually hunt for a specific group of adversaries. This means that a hunt team will be time bound to a specific period to search out those threat actors. Those same adversaries tend to not be constrained for completing their objectives within a specific timeline. If their current network of interest is crawling with defenders, they can hide...