What You Need to Hunt Down Cyber Threats

It’s time to take the offensive. It’s time to stop responding to threats and instead start hunting them down. While taking that proactive approach towards your cybersecurity isn’t a guarantee, it will help you weed out those hacking attempts faster, allowing you to catch more before they can do damage. 

So, what do you need to hunt down cyber threats? 

What is Threat Hunting? 

Threat hunting is a full-scale approach towards searching, identifying, and eliminating threats throughout your system. It uses multiple solutions and approaches to create a comprehensive model that analyses data to establish indicators of compromise, and then actively investigates those IOCs to spot weak points and threats as soon as possible. 

It’s not a single solution. It’s an approach, which is why if you want to hunt down cyber threats, it’s time to follow these steps: 

Onboard Security Experts 

If you don’t have a team of dedicated security experts on your side, you won’t get far. If you cannot afford a whole team on your payroll, then consider outsourcing to an agency. There are so many ways you can beef up your security methods with professionals, on any budget. 

Unify Your Data 

The best way to ensure the fastest and most effective threat hunt is to first go through and ingest all your data sources into a single data warehouse. Data warehouses are easier to defend. You can still lock it down with user access restrictions, too, so you don’t have to worry about the risk of having your data all in one place. In fact, by having your data in disparate places (a server, the cloud, an old hard drive, stored inside an old legacy tool, etc.), you are actually putting your company at risk. Clean that data, ingest it into a single solution, enforce strict data governance protocols, and see how fast you can hunt down threats in the future. 

The Right Tools 

To start threat hunting actively, you’ll need a set of tools to help you collect and analyze your system from a security standpoint. 

Managed Detection and Response 

Managed detection and response, or its sibling extended detection and response, allows you to automatically track your system 24/7. If there’s an anomalous or suspicious action, it flags it by priority, allowing your team to immediately understand when and where a potential breach happens. 

Endpoint Detection and Response 

EDR works to help you understand if and where threats from endpoints are happening. It provides endpoint-specific insights. 

Security Information and Event Management 

SIEM works to help track events, from a login to a download, to help understand user behavior. It, combined with MDR and EDR, helps create a robust understanding of your base behavior, allowing you to more effectively understand your system. 

Adopt the Right Frameworks 

Threat hunting can be conducted using a variety of frameworks. You may want to adopt the Sqrrl Threat Hunting Reference Model, or alternatively, the Prepare, Execute, & Act with Knowledge (PEAK) approach. 

To choose the right framework, consider whether you are hunting down threats proactively (there has been no attack yet), reactively (a threat has happened and you want to fully understand it), or exploratory (you want to find potential weaknesses).