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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how useful strategic threat intelligence is for a non-technical audience and how it gives everyone the why. Operational threat intelligence is useful for a technical audience and tells the analyst what to hunt for. Intelligence and intelligence analysts can provide answers to RFIs, data enrichment, and deliverables requested by an organization. These analysts and the information they provide are a must-have resource on any threat hunt – always include them as a critical component of the team.

The diamond model can provide much-needed visualization and the capability of pivoting off of single datasets. Train intel and hunt analysts on the partnership and how to communicate, as well as pivoting off of the data each provides to the other.

Intelligence feeds can be a great addition to the automation of data analysis as well as the correlation of information. Be mindful and selective of threat feeds to minimize noise that intel and hunt analysts...