Cyber Threat Hunting

The increasing rate of global connectivity and cloud services to save sensitive data and share personal information have increased the need for cybersecurity.

Organizations once depended solely on basic firewalls and antivirus tools as their security safeguards.

Unfortunately, the increase in sophisticated cybercriminals’ activities puts every organization at the risk of cyber-attack or data breaches.

Because a data attack undermines data integrity and creates distrust in any organization, technical controls are needed to oversee third-party risk and protect computing systems from malicious attacks.

Threat Hunting, and other penetration testing activities take the lead in this.

What Does Threat Hunting Mean in Cyber Security?

In cybersecurity, threat hunting is a proactive or prescient search for malicious attackers hidden inside a network through manual and machine-assisted methods. Threat hunting searches exhaustively for malware that has gotten past the initial security defenses. As a predictive activity based on the assumption of a breach, threat hunting employs new threat intelligence to inspect collected data in an attempt to detect possible threats.

As cybercrimes increase, security personnel hold the belief that no security system can be fully impenetrable. Often, attackers have been found quietly gathering data, login credentials, and confidential materials within a network for months while the network remained unaware.

Hence, cyber threat hunting is set up as a layered security approach to form hypotheses and confirm them through an active search of the network. Instead of waiting for Compromise Indicators before deploying the newest tools to respond, cyber hunting strongly assumes that a network breach has occurred or will occur and continues until every threat is eliminated. With machine learning, automation, and user/entity behavior analytics (UEBA) influencing the process, skilled security professionals rely on threat hunting to improve detection of hidden threats already present and to address potential attacks on a network or computing system.

There is no question that threat hunting is an effective way to strengthen an organization's security. Specialized skills, knowledge of the cyber terrain, and suitable data are essential to hunt threats effectively and uncover concealed malicious activity in the network.

Threat Hunting Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures

In threat hunting, there is a broad range of procedures that a person can follow. Below, we look at the different tactics, techniques, and procedures to follow when performing cyber threat hunting.

Tactics

In cybersecurity, tactics are the actions and steps taken to perform threat hunting; the following are just a few options among different approaches.

• Understand the network’s routines and architecture
• Know the threats by performing threat modeling
• Automated dark web scanning
• Monitor the activities and access of endpoints
• Enhance network visibility through the use of monitoring solutions like Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)
• Perform internal reconnaissance

Techniques

Over time, various techniques have been introduced to identify threats in a system. We have described the most widely used threat hunting techniques.

Searching

Searching is the most basic threat hunting technique. It entails querying data for particular artifacts using precisely defined search criteria. This technique requires a high degree of accuracy, because a broad search for general artifacts may return many results of minimal value, while an overly narrow one may return too few results to draw a conclusion. Essentially, a security professional who uses the search technique must make sensible determinations about where to begin their search. These sensible determinations can be generated from the correlative results of environmental data sources such as flow records, alerts, logs, digital images, memory dumps, and system events.

Clustering

The clustering technique works as a kind of unsupervised machine learning that applies advanced search methods to identify correlations within a very large data set. This technique acts like an analyst and produces a report according to the parameters that have been established. It identifies patterns and seemingly unrelated correlations, then assembles them to create a starting point for cyber threat hunting. In essence, it is a measurement technique aimed at isolating groups (clusters) of similar information based on particular features extracted from a larger body of information. By applying machine learning, this technique manages and examines a data set that does not explicitly share behavioral statistics. Security professionals generally use this technique because it helps reveal aggregate behaviors, such as common occurrences within a network.

Grouping

This technique passes several distinct artifacts through a sequence of elimination filters, then observes which ones appear together. It gives the professional a hint about how the artifacts relate and whether they may be interoperable. Although clustering and grouping appear similar, they differ. Grouping works according to specific criteria, while clustering works on the information that is available. Clustering uses multiple data points to identify the set of information that should be investigated with the grouping technique.

Stacking

This technique entails examining a set of information with similar values in the hope of finding similar details within the provided information. Its effectiveness decreases when a large data set is involved, but it is highly effective when the input has been carefully filtered.

Procedures

The procedure is the approach taken to accomplish threat hunting. The most practical procedural approach is below. This is more about scientific approach and methodologies than the actual step-by-step tactics. Each tactic can contain all of the following steps.

1. Hypotheses: Cyber threat hunting begins with the threat hunter’s assumption of the threat and the proposed technique required to find them.
2. Data Processing: At this point, the threat hunter develops a plan to collect, centralize, and process the necessary data. Software such as Security Information and Event Management can be employed to provide insight and track the record of activities.
3. Triggering: Advanced detection tools direct hunters to investigate a specific area of the network when the hypotheses serve as a trigger.
4. Investigation: Hunters use technologies such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) to examine potential malware in a system and ultimately determine whether it is malicious or not.
5. Resolution: Findings from the investigation go to the security technology to be resolved. That technology can delete malicious files, recover removed files, revise firewall rules, and alter system settings.

So Why Employ Cyber Threat Hunting?

Attackers employ advanced methods and novel attack types to avoid being caught by antivirus tools. As a result, more malware attacks have succeeded. Thus, threat hunting serves as a proactive process to detect this low-visibility malware before it completes its search and steal or destroy mission.

Conclusions

Threat hunting is a proactive approach towards identifying cyber threats within a network via sophisticated detection technology. It's a practice adopted to halt the impact of malicious actors in the network. To effectively apply this defensive strategy, threat hunters need to integrate result enabling tactics, techniques, and procedures while making sure the network remains safe and secure.