Threat hunting is the practice of proactively searching for cyber threats that are lurking undetected in a network. After sneaking in, an attacker can stealthily remain in a network for months as they quietly collect data, look for confidential material, or obtain login credentials that will allow them to move laterally across the environment.

Once an adversary is successful in evading detection and an attack has penetrated an organization’s defenses, many organizations lack the advanced detection capabilities needed to stop the advanced persistent threats from remaining in the network. That’s why threat hunting is an essential component of any defense strategy.

Threat hunting is highly complementary to the standard process of incident detection, response, and remediation. As security technologies analyze the raw data to generate alerts, threat hunting is working in parallel – using queries and automation – to extract hunting leads out of the same data.

Hunting leads are then analyzed by human threat hunters, who are skilled in identifying the signs of adversary activity, which can then be managed through the same pipeline.

A top threat hunting service takes a three-pronged approach to attack detection. Along with skilled security professionals, it includes two other components necessary for successful hunting: vast data and powerful analytics.

1. Human Capital

Every new generation of security technology is able to detect a greater number of advanced threats — but the most effective detection engine is still the human brain. Automated detection techniques are inherently predictable, and today’s attackers are very aware of this and develop techniques to bypass, evade or hide from automated security tools. Human threat hunters are an absolutely critical component in an effective threat hunting service.

Since proactive hunting depends on human interaction and intervention, success depends on who is hunting through the data. Intrusion analysts must have expertise to identify sophisticated targeted attacks, and they also must have the necessary security resources to respond to any discovery of unusual behavior.

2. A Wealth of Data

The service must also have the ability to gather and store granular system events data in order to provide absolute visibility into all endpoints and network assets. With the use of a scalable cloud infrastructure, a good security service then aggregates and perform real-time analysis on these large data sets.

3. Threat Intelligence

Lastly, a threat hunting solution should be able to cross-references internal organizational data with the latest threat intelligence about external trends and deploys sophisticated tools to effectively analyze and correlate malicious actions.

Threat intelligence is important for the following reasons:

sheds light on the unknown, enabling security teams to make better decisions

empowers cyber security stakeholders by revealing adversarial motives and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)

helps security professionals better understand the threat actor’s decision-making process

empowers business stakeholders, such as executive boards, CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs; to invest wisely, mitigate risk, become more efficient and make faster decisions

Threat intelligence benefits organizations of all shapes and sizes by helping process threat data to better understand their attackers, respond faster to incidents and proactively get ahead of a threat actor’s next move. For SMBs, this data helps them achieve a level of protection that would otherwise be out of reach. On the other hand, enterprises with large security teams can reduce the cost and required skills by leveraging external threat intel and make their analysts more effective.

Tactical intelligence is focused on the immediate future, is technical in nature, and identifies simple indicators of compromise (IOCs). Tactical intelligence is the easiest type of intelligence to generate and is almost always automated. As a result, it can be found via open source and free data feeds, but it usually has a very short lifespan because IOCs such as malicious IPs or domain names can become obsolete in days or even hours.