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

How to determine the success of a hunting program

We mentioned some of the key points that define a successful threat hunting program in the previous chapter, Chapter 12, Understanding the Output. The definition will vary depending on the organization's mission, but it should cover at least the following:

  • The hunting team has established a data model and a data quality assurance process.
  • The hunting team drives all their hunts using threat intelligence relevant to the organization.
  • The hunting team is detecting visibility gaps too.
  • The hunting team is properly automating all generated detections.
  • The hunting team is properly documenting the hunts, successful or not.

On top of these goals, we can also assess the success of the threat hunting program depending on the threat hunting team's maturity evolution. For this, as explained in Chapter 2, What Is Threat Hunting?, you can use David Bianco's Threat Hunting Maturity Model:

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