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

Chapter 5: Methodologies

So far in this book, we have been outlining the pieces that are needed to conduct a threat hunt and the environments in which they can operate. Before we learn how to execute a hunt, we need to go over some methodologies we can utilize. Regardless of what any individuals' feelings are toward any specific framework, a threat hunting team should always base its processes and organization on a methodology.

Why?

Methodologies enable teams to have repeatable processes that make sense. Frameworks and methodologies help ensure that a threat hunting team consistently aligns its efforts toward the goals and concerns of the business. Methodologies are the frameworks and structure that the details are built onto to keep the entire process aligned with what matters to the organization. They turn pure chaos into something slightly less chaotic and eventually into a highly organized system. To facilitate this transition, we will cover the general-purpose hunting...