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 importance of documentation

Often disliked and disregarded, documentation is actually the key to the kingdom in any technical team. In a threat hunting team, and probably in any team, you will want to avoid "knowledge hoarding." This refers to senior staff not being able to take a day off because things don't seem to work without them, or projects that fall apart when someone suddenly leaves. Also, your goal should be to prevent forgetting what the thing you did last month was, and how and why you did it. In threat hunting, documentation is crucial not only to help new hires to understand what the team does but also to prevent the team from repeating the same hunts over and over. Keeping good communication will also help you track your team's success and communicate it to the C-suite when necessary.

Besides hunting, documentation has to meet certain criteria to be considered good. Let's take a look at what we need to do in order to write good documentation...