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

Scenario B – external threat hunt

CSI International had an external communication platform that they use to work as a team. They will continue to use that platform, Teams, and build a separate channel and chat to centralize communications for the organization engaged. These avenues will remain private to the team for the duration of the engagement. This will allow them to speak bluntly about findings and the situation without impacting the customer and their partners during the engagement.

Through Teams, the team lead has a separate channel built for use with the system administrator and security team. The threat hunting team lead encouraged the lead administrator and security team lead to utilize their smartphones for this communication because there are concerns the threat actor is still in the system and could be monitoring their workstations since the administrator and security team are critical members. The leaders of those sections have agreed and will be the only two...