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

Chapter 5: Working with Data

In this chapter, we are going to review how to work with data so that we can document security events in a way that will allow us to hunt for them effectively. The goal of this approach is to understand the data we are collecting and have everything documented in a way that will allow us to have an idea of what can we hunt for, as well as which data may be missing from our collection process. First, we are going to cover two data models that can be used to help us understand our data sources: OSSEM data dictionaries and MITRE CAR. Then, we are going to close this chapter by reviewing Sigma rules: an open signature format that can be applied to any log file and that can be used to describe and share detections.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using data dictionaries
  • Using MITRE CAR
  • Using Sigma

Let's get started!