How to Achieve Proactive Threat Hunting
13.11.2019
Read
Threat hunting practices are gaining much more importance as hackers and cyber threats focus on improving their stealth. As a result, it is essential for organizations to take on a proactive stance on threat hunting. Continue reading to learn how you can manage that. What is threat hunting? Threat hunting is one of the fundamental cyber security practices. It aims to detect stealthy attacks and threats that go undetected by the traditional security measures. In order to make sure that your organization is safe, you must not rely solemnly on preventive measures. It is true that firewall, antivirus software, SIEM and such measures help you keep the most intruders out but with the proactive operations like threat hunting, you are able to go the extra mile to enhance the security posture of your organization. As of today, many attackers focus on the techniques that allow them to go undetected while they are penetrating through your security. Moreover, it might take a while to notice them even after they manage to get in. Threat hunting techniques allow your cyber security professionals to find and eliminate such stealthy attacks.
Traditional security procedures rely on the possibility of the attackers revealing themselves. But what if they succeed to remain under the radar up until it is too late for you to efficiently eliminate the threat? What if the attackers lock you out of the systems before you notice that you are under attack? With an adept threat hunting procedure, you don’t have to stress over such possibilities. Threat hunting practices allow your security professionals to think like a hacker. They consider the weak points of your security posture, and they think of ways to exploit such points. This approach allows your security team to know where and what to look for. As a result, they start the race ahead. They can detect emerging issues and contain them before they turn into all-out security incidents. To sum up, threat hunting practices give you the upper hand and allows you to manage potential threats before they hurt your organization.
According to a recent research by Crowdstrike, 88% of organizations believe that their current Threat Hunting practices are in need of radical improvements. That is why adopting a more proactive Threat Hunting approach has been one of the hot topics in the cyber security communities for a while now. If you too feel the need to improve your threat hunting playbook, you might start with creating a more prioritized security protocol. Listing the assets of your organization in accordance with their value helps you to create a threat hunting roadmap which mainly focuses on the security of crucial assets.
This way, your cyber security professionals can spend the majority of their time on protecting the most important assets and moreover, they can come up with an incident response concentrating on the heart of your organization. Second step to a more proactive threat hunting is making use of the data. Every second, your security measures gather data that shows the weaknesses, strengths and trends over your network and systems. With the proper use of this data, your security professionals can know what to look for in order to detect a threat. The data concerning the previous threats and incidents provide a clear map for the threat hunters. And finally, you must plan when and how the threat hunting will be executed. It is best to practice threat hunting on a regular basis and report the findings. With the information provided by these reports, your security professionals can conduct their business in a more elaborate way.
