Finding attackers before they find you is critical to strengthening your cyber defenses. How to do this efficiently and effectively is no easy task, but a small investment of time can save your organization millions of dollars by mastering threat hunting.
Consider this amazing statistic. Cyber security Ventures estimates that cybercrime will cost the global economy $10.5 trillion by 2025. Measured in this amount as a country, the cost of cybercrime is comparable to the world’s third largest economy after the United States and China. But effective threat hunting can prevent bad actors from wreaking havoc on your organization.
In this article, we take a closer look at what threat hunting is, how to do it thoroughly and effectively, and how cyber threat intelligence (CTI) can enhance your threat hunting efforts.
What is Threat Hunting?
Cyberthreat hunting collects evidence that threats are real. It’s an ongoing process that uncovers the threats that pose the most significant risk to your organization and enables your team to stop them before attacks begin.
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Six-part threat hunting
Careful planning and attention to detail are essential as well as ensuring that all team members follow the same plan throughout the hunt. To stay efficient, document every step so other members of your team can easily repeat the same process.
1 — Organize a hunt.
Ensure your team is prepared and organized by creating an inventory of critical assets such as endpoints, servers, applications and services. This step will help you understand what you are trying to protect and the threats they are most prone to. Next, determine the location of each asset, who has access, and how access is provisioned.
Finally, define your Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) by asking questions about potential threats based on your organization’s environment and infrastructure. For example, if you have a remote or hybrid workforce, questions might include:
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To which threats are remote devices most vulnerable?
- What evidence do these threats leave behind?
- How do we determine if an employee has been compromised?
2 — Plan your hunt.
In this phase, set the required parameters as follows:
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State the purpose, such as why hunting is necessary and which threats should be the focus, as determined by the PIR. (For example, in the BYOD model, remote employees can be vulnerable to phishing attacks.)
- Define your scope – identify your assumptions and state them based on what you know. You can narrow your scope by understanding what evidence will surface if the threat you’re looking for occurs.
- Understand limitations such as what datasets can be accessed, what resources need to be analyzed, and how much time is allotted.
- Set a deadline by setting a realistic deadline.
- Decide which environments to exclude and look for contractual relationships that might prevent hunting from running in a particular setting.
- Understand the legal and regulatory constraints that must be adhered to. (Even if you hunt bad guys, you can’t break the law.)
3 — Use the right tools for the job.
There are many tools for threat hunting, depending on your asset inventory and assumptions. For example, if you’re looking for a potential breach, your SIEM and investigative tools can help you review your logs to determine if there’s a leak. Below is a sample list of options that can greatly improve your threat hunting efficiency.
- Threat intelligence – specifically automated feeds and research portals that pull threat intelligence from the deep and dark web
- Search engines and web spiders
- Information from cybersecurity and antivirus vendors
- government resources
- Public media – cybersecurity blogs, online news sites, magazines
- SIEM, SOAR, survey tools, OSINT tools
Four — run the hunt
When running a hunt, it’s best to keep it simple. Follow your plan step by step, stay on schedule and avoid distractions and distractions. Execution he takes place in four phases.
- collection: This is the most labor-intensive part of threat hunting, especially when using manual methods to gather threat information.
- process: Compile the data and process it in an organized, readable format that other threat analysts can understand.
- analyse: Determine what the findings reveal.
- Conclusion: If you find a threat, do you have data to support its severity?
Five — Finish and evaluate the hunt.
Evaluating your work before starting your next hunt is essential to improving as you go. Questions to consider at this stage are:
- Were the hypotheses chosen suitable for exploration?
- Was the range narrow enough?
- Have you gathered any useful information, or is it possible that some process could be done differently?
- Did you have the right tools?
- Did everyone follow plans and processes?
- Did leaders feel empowered to address questions along the way, and did they have access to all the information they needed?
6 — Report findings and act on them.
After completing the survey, you can check whether the data supports your hypothesis. If so, alert cybersecurity and incident response teams. If there is no evidence of a specific problem, resources should be evaluated to ensure there are no gaps in data analysis. For example, you may find that you checked your logs for breaches but didn’t check for leaked data on the dark web.
Take threat hunting to the next level with CTI
CTI can be an effective component of your threat hunting program, especially if your threat intelligence data is comprehensive and includes business context and organizational relevance. Cybersixgill removes barriers to access to CTI’s most valuable sources and provides deep investigative capabilities to help teams hunt for top-priority potential cyber threats.
Our research portal allows you to compile, manage and monitor a complete asset inventory across the deep, dark and clear web. This intelligence helps identify potential risks and exposures, understand potential attack vectors and threat actor TTPs, and proactively expose and stop new cyberattacks before they are weaponized. increase.
Download my latest report for more information Threat hunting for effective cybersecurity.To schedule a demo, please visit https://cybersixgill.com/book-a-demo.
Note: This article was professionally written and contributed by Michael-Angelo Zummo, Senior Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst at Cybersixgill.
