What is cyber threat hunting?

Cyber threat hunting is both an automated and manual process conducted by a highly skilled team of threat hunters to discover and identify threats that have evaded your organization’s traditional security defenses. Threat hunters leverage an attacker’s known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to conduct deeper investigations and find context-relevant data when a security alert is triggered.

Is Cyber Threat Hunting Proactive or Reactive?

Cyber threat hunting is a proactive method used to find hidden threats within your organization’s environment. It involves using tools and techniques to investigate potential incidents, identify malicious activity, and track down the cyberattackers behind it. The threat hunters provide the human element that complements the automated tools and technologies you may have in place, such as a SIEM or SOAR.

Why Do Organizations Utilize Cyber Threat Hunting?

Organizations use cyber threat hunting to:

• Fill the gaps in traditional cyber defenses: Many cyberattacks can evade detection from conventional security measures, but they may be caught by a cyber threat hunting team explicitly looking for them.

• Become more proactive in their cybersecurity efforts: Rather than waiting for an attack to happen, cyber threat hunting teams can proactively search for threats and take steps to prevent them from disrupting your business.

• Improve the response time to cyberattacks: When a cyberattack does occur, a cyber threat hunting team can quickly identify the nature of the attack and take steps to mitigate the damage.

What Are The Benefits of Automating Cyber Threat Hunting?

Automation can help you to speed up your processes, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency. The benefits of automation in cyber threat hunting include:

1. Speed: You can automate certain repetitive tasks to help you focus on critical tasks and improve your overall efficiency, such as enabling the cyber threat hunting team to set frequent searches for specific indicators of compromise (IOCs).

2. Accuracy: You can improve the accuracy of any findings related to cyber threat intelligence and reduce the amount of human error by automating the collection and analysis of data.

3.  Efficiency: You can increase the efficiency of your cyber threat hunts as well as the threat detections and investigations by using artificial intelligence to recognize new patterns and drive new threat intelligence, containment, and response actions.

4. Recurring: Automated cyber threat hunting allows for a constant and continual searching for indicators, meaning that hunts are occurring 24/7.

What Is The Difference Between Cyber Threat Hunting and Threat Intelligence?

Cyber threat intelligence is both a process and a product – it’s information and data regarding an attacker’s TTPs, gained through various collection methods including open source, closed source, enrichment of the security providers’ own data, and trusted partners. That information and data is then processed and operationalized by a variety of cybersecurity operations teams, including threat hunters who will then conduct cyber threat hunts across the clients’ networks using both manual and automated tools.

This information and data allows the threat intelligence team to correlate and enrich data found in your environment and apply that intelligence to enable cyber threat hunters to conduct a comprehensive system-wide sweep to discover existing and emerging threats.

Furthermore, a successful cyber threat hunt may disclose hostile actions that have yet to be detected in the wild. In other words, cyber threat hunting is the sword to the threat intelligence shield, you need both to defend networks.

Does My Organization Need Cyber Threat hunting Services?

Cyber threats are not going away anytime soon – in fact, in the past few years, the use of cyberattacks has only amplified. Cybercriminals are using Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) to launch targeted attacks against organizations and many adversaries are investing heavily in research and development to create novel malware and ransomware strains that can evade detection.

Unfortunately, there is a significant skills shortage in the cybersecurity industry. Many organizations are challenged with finding the right talent for their in-house security operations team and even if they find the talent, it’s harder to retain them. In addition, cyber threat hunting may sound simple in theory, but it takes highly skilled security practitioners who have been battle-tested and have significant expertise.

This is why many organizations are now leveraging an external cyber threat hunting team that acts as an extension of the in-house cybersecurity team to develop new detections enriched by original cyber threat intelligence and new machine learning models that correlate multi-signal data and automate response capabilities to cyber threats.

Prevent Advanced Cyber Threats From Breaking Through Your Defenses With eSentire's Cyber Threat Hunting

Reclaim your advantage and gain full visibility of your complete attack surface with a 24/7 SOC staffed with Cyber Analysts and Elite Threat Hunters. eSentire’s cyber threat hunting services see, and stop, cyberattacks other providers miss to deliver the world's most complete response.

We improve the efficacy of threat intelligence data and efficiently apply it to hypothesis-driven threat hunting to protect your environment. What’s more is that we proactively hunt and build new detection models through the power of artificial intelligence pattern recognition to drive new intelligence, containment and response actions so you benefit from 24/7 threat hunting and complete response capabilities.

It’s time to add world class threat researchers to your team to proactively hunt the most advanced undetected threats. Learn more about eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) now.