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 7: Planning

At this point, every piece that is required for a successful threat hunt has been identified. Now it is time to put all of the pieces together. In doing so, the team will quickly move from thinking we really need to do this to a place that will allow them to say we did this right.

In Chapter 5, Methodologies, the hunting cycle was discussed with the starting point of identifying requirements. These are the business needs and concerns that are the origin of the threat hunt. What are the items that the organizational leadership is concerned with? What are the network administrators and defenders seeing that is of concern? What is being targeted online that is similar to our organization? Is there a critical software vulnerability in some dependency the organization might be using?

All of these items should be prioritized and approved by the requesting organization. The goal is to start planning with all the stakeholders on the same page as far as what the requirements...