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

Data sources

We can mainly distinguish between three types of data sources: endpoint data sources, network data sources, and security data sources. Each data source provides activity logs. A log file is a record of events that took place in a specific environment or during software execution. Logs are made up of entries, where each entry corresponds to an event.

Although logs are very useful sources of information when we're monitoring and doing forensics analysis, dealing with them involves dealing with a whole set of problems regarding different formats and storage capacity. The Guide to Computer Security Log Management (HTTPS://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-92.pdf), written by Karen Kent and Murugiah Souppaya, offers a good insight into the most common issues and how to solve them.

Most of the examples you are going to see in the following sections have been gathered from the Windows Event Log Viewer. It would be a great practice if, while...