Threat Hunting

This section is under development

Objective

"Threat hunting is a proactive and iterative approach to detecting threats." (Lee and Bianco, 2016)

The objective of Threat Hunting[1] is a proactive search of systems for adversaries and compromise. Whereas Continuous Monitoring is a reactive service, Threat Hunting strives to actively search logs, controls, countermeasures and activity to identify signs of compromise before they are detected.

The definition is not fully agreed upon, however is described in a similar fashion by multiple sources.[2][3][4][5]

Hunting activity is related to other services as it feeds into Content Engineering, Continuous Monitoring, Log Management and Compliance and Risk Management.

Hunting also receives inputs from Threat Intelligence, Enterprise Intelligence, Content Engineering and Risk Management.

Process

• Known IOC Hunting

"Hunters should be careful about relying too much on IOCs. In the industry today there are many threat data feeds that lack the context to make them true indicators." (Lee and Bianco, 2016)

• Hypothesis Method[6][7]
• Exploratory Data Science[8][9][10][11]

Tooling

• SIEM, log management or other log collection and analysis tools
• Data analytics tools

Citations

Robert M. Lee and David Bianco. 2016. Generating Hypotheses for Successful Threat Hunting. Retrieved from https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/threats/generating-hypotheses-successful-threat-hunting-37172