Building an Effective Threat Hunting Program
Once cyber threat intelligence is gathered threat hunters can conduct threat hunts to search for signs of early threat actor targeting behaviors, malicious activities or indicators of compromise (IOCs) before threat actors establish a deeper presence within your organization’s environment. This process involves monitoring both attacker behaviors such as evidence of lateral movement, privilege escalation attempts, and anomalous user activity, as well as indicators like the presence of malware artifacts, unusual network traffic, and command & control mechanisms.
An effective threat hunting program carries three primary objectives:
- 1
Identify unknown threats and vulnerabilities before they can inflict significant damage.
- 2
Enhance your security posture by integrating the insights gained from proactive global threat hunts into a wider cybersecurity strategy.
- 3
Reduce the mean time to detect (MTTD) and the mean time to respond (MTTR) to cyber threats so you can minimize their potential impact.
Your threat hunts will dictate if a new detection should be built based on the information collected. Once a new detection and runbook are developed, the Elite Threat Hunters proceed to the next unknown threat, repeating the entire process.
How Proactive Threat Hunting Enables Cyber Resilience
Tip: Every organization should have threat detection engineers or content developers, either in-house or in partnership with an MDR provider.
Learn how to build an effective threat hunting program for proactive cyber defense.
