In the world of cybersecurity, preventing a threat is always the best course of action. It minimizes the risk of threats crawling your network undetected because you'll be searching for them. Threat hunting is about finding malicious files in your network after they bypassed your endpoint security.
THREAT HUNTING EXPLAINED
Some malicious files may still successfully bypass your defenses. If undetected, these files can gather confidential materials or login credentials for months or years. If you don't have the detection capabilities you need to hunt these malicious actors down, they will continue to do so. A good defense needs both endpoint security and proactive threat detection.
Common Threat Hunting Techniques Used
Threat hunters start their investigations with the assumption that malicious programs have penetrated your defenses. They usually use the following techniques to find the threats:
- Search. This technique searches evidential data. Threat hunting goes through logs, flow records, digital photos, complete packet data, alerts, and system events. The effectiveness of the search lies in the search criteria they use. These should not be too broad or too narrow to avoid receiving too many or too few results, respectively.
- Cluster. Threat hunting takes clusters of similar data from a larger set of data. Doing so allows them to pinpoint correlations, similarities, and other interesting points. It makes it easier to gain insights for a better overview of the activities in your network.
- Group. Grouping also requires putting similar data together. However, it is different from clustering because it only focuses on suspicious data.
- Stack. Threat hunting can also be done by tracking how often certain occurrences have happened to specific groups of data. Stacking works well on a massive volume of data if inputs are organized and data sets produce a limited number of results. Threat hunting may use a tool as simple as Excel for stacking.
What Happens During Threat Hunting?
Threat hunting threats usually come in three stages. These include identifying the trigger, investigating, and resolving it.
Finding the trigger can help threat hunters decide which part of the network needs in-depth investigation. Triggers often consist of irregular actions seen in the system. These usually show the potential presence of malicious files.
Depending on the latest news about advanced threats, the threat hunting team can set their search parameters. They can target only suspicious files like file-less malware.
The second step is the investigation. Threat hunters rely on technology to better understand the malicious files' workings. One such technology is endpoint detection and response (EDR). It helps analyze how much damage and compromise the malicious actor has done to your system. The investigation will only conclude once the threat hunting team knows the full extent of the attack's damage to your system.
The third and last step is the resolution. It includes briefing the security team about the threats so they can respond to the breach properly. It is also during this stage that threat hunters collect as much data as possible about the threat. They need to know what attacks were used and the vulnerabilities exploited. These can help prevent future breaches and reinforce the organization's security defenses.
Do You Need Threat Hunting Services?
Threat hunting requires a specific set of skills and lots of experience. This combination also means threat hunters come at a steep price. But you can still enjoy threat hunters' services at a more affordable cost from managed services. They have the expertise of their team that can monitor your network 24/7 without costing you too much.
If you hire threat hunting professionals, they can give you human expertise, vast data, and powerful threat intelligence. There are security tools available in the market to hunt down advanced threats. However, they still need the human brain to find threats by analyzing unusual behavior from sophisticated attacks.
Cybersecurity firms can provide scalable cloud storage capacity to store a vast amount of event data. Threat hunters have to scan through these enormous volumes of data from all the network assets and endpoints. Excellent threat hunting services should be able to examine data against the latest threat intelligence. They should also use the right tools to find malicious behavior.
Managed services have the right people, tools, and data storage to handle your threat hunting needs. These are things that you or many threat hunters do not have.
Why Choose Xcitium?
If you are looking for managed threat hunting to boost your security, Xcitium can help you handle it. We have managed detection and response, security analytics, and security information and event management. These are some of the tools we use in detecting hidden threats.
Have peace of mind while conducting your business. Know that Xcitium experts are thoroughly checking for potential threats for you. Contact Xcitium today!
