Cyber threat hunting is more than just an industry term or a cool-sounding skill to have on your résumé. It’s also a crucial aspect of a well-developed cybersecurity strategy. This blog post helps you to understand threat hunting and 5 practices to keep your network safe.
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What is Threat Hunting?
The act of searching for signs of cyber threats in order to prevent them from happening or causing too much damage is known as threat hunting. It’s a proactive technique that secures your company’s IT assets and data through constant monitoring and analysis. Threat hunting usually involves thinking like an attacker and identifying weak points before they are attacked.
You don’t want your firm playing defense in a world where hackers attempt cyberattacks every 39 seconds and the average cost of a data breach is roughly $4 million. Instead, you’ll want to foresee attacks before they occur. If your firm prioritizes network security and monitoring, threat hunting should be a part of your IT security processes.
Key Components of Threat Hunting
The purpose of threat hunting is to monitor everyday network activity and traffic and analyze possible threats in order to detect any yet-undiscovered malicious behaviors that could lead to a full-fledged breach. Threat hunting combines four equally important components to reach this level of early detection:
Methodology
To be effective at threat hunting, businesses must commit to a proactive, full-time, continuing, and ever-evolving approach. A reactive, ad hoc, “when we have time” mindset will be unproductive and yield only minor results.
Technology
Most businesses now have complete endpoint security solutions in place, including automated detection. Threat hunting works in addition to these and uses modern technology to detect irregularities, unusual patterns, and other evidence of attackers that should not be present in systems and files. New cloud-native endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) that use big data analytics can collect and process large volumes of unscripted endpoint data, while behavioral metrics and artificial intelligence can provide extensive, real-time visibility into the malicious activity that appears normal at first.
Highly professional and skilled employees
Threat hunters, also known as cybersecurity threat analysts, are unique types of specialists. These specialists not only understand how to use the mentioned security technologies, but they also combine a tenacious desire to go on the offense with a natural problem-solving forensic ability to find and mitigate hidden threats.
Threat Intelligence
Having access to evidence-based global intelligence from specialists all around the world improves and expedites the search for pre-existing IOCs. Hunters are supported by information like attack classifications for identifying malware and threat groups, as well as advanced threat indicators that can help zero in on dangerous IOCs.
5 Threat Hunting Practices
To detect and prevent possible attacks, threat hunters should follow a few basic best practices. The following are a number of approaches you can take to start efficiently hunting for threats.
Don’t forget the basics
The first step in protecting your network is to implement effective endpoint security. Endpoint security is becoming increasingly important for overall network safety, especially as more employees work remotely and access your network from a number of locations and devices. Making sure these major access points are secure—and receiving quick alerts if they are damaged, can help you in staying ahead of threat discovery.
Understand your environment
You won’t be able to discover discrepancies and irregularities that indicate suspicious behavior if you don’t know what “normal” looks like in your IT environment. Gaining a solid knowledge of your environment’s routine and architecture will enable you to discover problems more efficiently. This is known as baselining.
For instance, Do you know the baseline balance of internal and external traffic? Which IP addresses should and should not be allowed to connect to your network? What does your system look like on a Sunday morning vs a Wednesday mid-afternoon? Unusual traffic patterns are generally the first indication of a networking event, but they cannot be recognized until you know where your network is coming from.
Think like an attacker
When you take a proactive approach to threat detection, which is a symptom of a mature security strategy, you must understand what cybercriminals are thinking. By viewing your system through the eyes of an attacker, you can gain a better understanding of your system’s vulnerabilities and weak spots.
Threat modeling exercises, in which you simulate an attack on your system in a safe environment to observe how it reacts, are incredibly helpful techniques. Selecting specific areas of your environment to target will allow you to see it through the eyes of an attacker. Understanding how your team and environment react will help you in the following ways:
- Analyze your threat detection and prevention efforts to see where you can improve.
- Recognize the areas where vulnerabilities must be fixed.
- Provide you with simulated historical data that will notify you of the real attack’s presence.
Making security, not attacks, an inside job.
Internal actors are involved in more than one-third of data breaches. Whether these internal occurrences are purposeful or the result of carelessness or ignorance, it is vital that your employees grasp basic cybersecurity standards. Ensuring that everyone on staff understands not to share sensitive information over email or open unusual document attachments can go a long way toward preventing attacks.
Installing and monitoring fundamental cybersecurity and threat monitoring tools can also help you in tracking suspicious internal actions. When you educate your employees to be fellow threat hunters by giving them basic cybersecurity information, you increase your chances of preventing, detecting, and redirecting threats from any source.
Maintain continual attention
Cybercriminals are constantly on the hunt for new ways to attack vulnerable IT settings. You should be as well. To be a good threat hunter, you must be aware of current attack trends and regularly educate yourself on new attack methodologies. You can launch a strong cybersecurity awareness program as well. When you understand the sources of the next major danger and what it can do to your network, you’ll be better prepared to deal with it.
Conclusion
Threat hunting is a complex and demanding process, but with the right people, technology, and tactics, it can greatly enhance your firm’s security and prevent serious problems from happening.
