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

Success factors

This portion of planning is what separates the teams that did things and the ones that did things that matter. It is the simple act of outlining the requirements to include the tasks and objectives that will be measured against to quantify whether the hunt was a success.

A measurement of performance (MOP) attempts to determine the following: did the analyst perform the action correctly? If the action was to review network data between a certain period, then the MOP would ask the following question: did the analyst review the data in that period? MOPs have yes or no answers and are, typically, very straightforward in meaning with no wiggle room for interpretation. Each MOP is directly tied to a task, or a group of tasks, performed by the hunt analyst. Those tasks will always be directly linked to answering questions for one of the hypotheses. If this chain of logic is ever broken, this is a sign that the resources on the team are being wasted.

A measurement of...