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

Types of intelligence

Before going too deep, we need to cover the main types of threat intelligence available today.

Strategic threat intelligence is a high-level concept of intelligence that covers an actor's motivations and intentions and potentially their capabilities. It will not get into the low-level details of how something is accomplished. Instead, this intelligence is the why behind the campaigns that threat actors execute on their victims.

This type of intelligence is great for ingestion at the managerial and leadership levels. A technical background is not typically required, yet it can still easily be correlated with the organizational priorities at large.

Operational threat intelligence is a context-rich version of intelligence that contains detailed information on things such as forensic analysis of toolsets and an adversary's known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This intelligence is the how and what of a threat actor's campaign....