Learning About Threat Hunting Services | CyberHunter Solutions

What Is Threat Hunting?

Threat hunting is when a skilled cybersecurity analyst uses manual (or machine-based) methods to find security events and threats that automated detection systems have missed. Analysts find the most dangerous threats with specific tools for threat hunting. To handle the huge amount of data which includes logs, metadata and packet capture (PCAP) data, they also need to know a lot about malware, exploits and network protocols.

Threat Hunting Key Characteristics

Threat hunting is not limited to large corporations with a substantial budget. Instead, any business may apply best practices by focusing on the following fundamental characteristics:

Being Proactive: Instead of waiting for a warning from an existing security device, threat hunting aggressively sniffs out potential intruders before any alerts are sent.

Embracing Creativity: Regarding threat hunting, it is not necessary to follow the regulations. Threat hunting involves ingenuity and the use of all acceptable methods, so as to stay ahead of the most brilliant and ingenious enemies (established or not).

Following Traces: The premise behind threat hunting is that an organization's environment has been penetrated – and attackers have left behind traces. It is thus essential to follow all traces and clues to their conclusion, regardless of how lengthy or convoluted the journey may be.

Trusting Gut Feelings: The best threat hunters do not rely excessively on tools' conclusive alerts and rule-based detections. Instead, they look for hints, rely on their intuition, and then apply what they’ve learned to develop automated hazard detection techniques.

Threat Hunting Common Techniques

4 fundamental threat hunting tactics are utilized to discover threats in an organization's environment:

Searching: This means looking through evidence data for specific artifacts using well-defined search criteria such as complete packet data, flow records, logs, alerts, system events, digital pictures and memory dumps. Because it's unusual to know what to look for when searching for threats, it's important to find the right balance between making the search parameters too broad and too narrow.

Clustering: This refers to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) extracting clusters of similar data points from a bigger data set. In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their organization's network (and determine what actions they should take next), analysts use this technique to gain a broader perspective on data of interest, identify commonalities and/or unrelated connections, and weave these insights together.

Grouping: This strategy aims to determine when numerous unique items appear together depending on supplied search criteria. While grouping is similar to clustering, it examines just an explicit group of previously determined suspicious items.

Stack Counting: This method, which is also called "stacking", counts how many times a certain type of data value shows up (and looks at the ones that stand out). Stacking works best when there are few outputs from a set of data, and the inputs are planned well. To find oddities in large data sets, you need to be able to organize, filter and edit the data; to do this, you need to use technology, even something as simple as Excel.

Threat Hunting Is Next Level Security

No matter how large or small, every business wants to find every possible risk as soon as it appears. That's why the amount of money spent on automated cybersecurity solutions is increasing so quickly. But automated systems can only do so much, especially since new attacks may not leave fingerprints for the most important parts, and not all threats can be found with standard detection methods.

In reality, data suggests that automated security technologies miss 44% of all attacks.

Choose Cyberhunter Threat Hunting Services

At CyberHunter, we offer effective ways to improve cybersecurity in aviation, healthcare, IT and more. Learn more about the basics of threat hunting services and how they can help protect your business from cyberattacks.

Contact us at (833) 292-4868 or visit CyberHunter Solutions online for more information.