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 choosing good analytics

As is the case with any other program in an organization, it is necessary to demonstrate results. Is the job that the team is doing effective? Is the tooling enough? Is the personnel enough? Is the program being effective? In order to answer all of these questions, among others, teams need to have a carefully selected set of metrics to show progress and prove that the program is working as expected (or not).

The right time to choose metrics is during the development stage. Ask yourself what a successful hunting program for your organization would be and select the metrics you are going to track depending on your answer.

So, what does "successful hunting program" mean? Given everything that has been covered so far, we are going to set up a list establishing what a successful hunting program will look like for us:

  • The hunting team has covered all the endpoints and data sources of the network.
  • The hunting team has...