Book Image

Practical Threat Intelligence and Data-Driven Threat Hunting

By : Valentina Costa-Gazcón
Book Image

Practical Threat Intelligence and Data-Driven Threat Hunting

By: Valentina Costa-Gazcón

Overview of this book

Threat hunting (TH) provides cybersecurity analysts and enterprises with the opportunity to proactively defend themselves by getting ahead of threats before they can cause major damage to their business. This book is not only an introduction for those who don’t know much about the cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and TH world, but also a guide for those with more advanced knowledge of other cybersecurity fields who are looking to implement a TH program from scratch. You will start by exploring what threat intelligence is and how it can be used to detect and prevent cyber threats. As you progress, you’ll learn how to collect data, along with understanding it by developing data models. The book will also show you how to set up an environment for TH using open source tools. Later, you will focus on how to plan a hunt with practical examples, before going on to explore the MITRE ATT&CK framework. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills you need to be able to carry out effective hunts in your own environment.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Cyber Threat Intelligence
5
Section 2: Understanding the Adversary
9
Section 3: Working with a Research Environment
14
Section 4: Communicating to Succeed
Appendix – The State of the Hunt

The HELK – an open source tool by Roberto Rodriguez

The Hunting ELK (HELK) is an open source hunting platform designed and developed by Roberto Rodriguez. Some of the advantages of using the HELK over a plain ELK environment are that the HELK has been built with advanced analytics capabilities and can be used both in research environments and in large production environments. The project, although widely adopted and praised, it still in its alpha stage of development and is expected to be subject to many changes:

Figure 7.72 – The HELK infrastructure by Roberto Rodriguez

Getting started with the HELK

If you opt to directly install the HELK, you will still need to deploy an Ubuntu machine. You will need to download the Linux distro. I'm going to use Ubuntu 18.04 (https://releases.ubuntu.com/), but you can use any of the other operating systems that the HELK has been optimized for; that is, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 16, CentOS 7, and CentOS 8...