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

Defining the scope

With the restraints and constraints listed, the idea of the scope of the threat hunt should be clear. The team will need to take the time to formalize and acknowledge, in writing, the proposed scope of the threat hunt. The extra communication will be utilized at each step of the hunt to ensure there's no confusion between the stakeholders and the team. Additionally, this will ensure that any contractual disagreements are rectified early on.

When documenting the scope, it should include a listing of the systems and networks that the team will be hunting on. If the organization says that they would like the team to hunt across their production network, then this network should be, at minimum, listed by name. If there is an enclave that is attached to that network, that enclave could be included by name. This is a great time to begin establishing the collection management framework, as outlined in The hunting cycle section of Chapter 5, Methodologies.

The...