An effective threat hunting is critical because it is hard to think like attackers and to search for the unknown in an enterprise network. This post may help organizations for an effective and successful threat hunting.
Knowledge of Topology and Environment
The purpose of threat hunting is to find the anomalies and their sources in the network and endpoint. So, a threat hunter should know what is normal and so can understand what is not normal.
From the risk management point of view, critical assets – servers, applications, data – should be known to protect more effectively. With the knowledge of the environment, the threat hunter knows the critical assets and hunts according to this. If there is segmentation in network, it is also critical to know the network topology and networks – or vlans – of these critical assets.
It is also necessary to know which application is running on which operating system, so the threat hunter can know the weaknesses of the system and can search according to these weaknesses.
Effective Endpoint Management
For threat hunting, the most used tools are EDRs. Organizations should be sure that they installed endpoint security tools to all endpoints and detect when they removed or stopped. Asset management is something more than CMDB. It must be managed by security teams whose understanding the criticality of the lack of endpoint security tool in an endpoint.
Intel
Threat intelligence is one of the most important feeds of threat hunting. Threat hunters need to have most recent intelligence and IoCs so they cant perform hunting the latest threats. Many malicious are produced and detected every day. This situation causes a lot of noises about intel. To avoid this noise, hunters should get valuable intelligence about their organization’s sector and geolocation, and integrate these IoCs with SIEM, EDR, etc..
Personnel
We all know that new tactics and techniques are created by attackers in general. The most important reason for this is while security professionals in organizations have to deal with so many different things, attackers can only focus on their target. Even if it so important to have valuable/experienced personnel, if they are dealing with different organizational missions while they are working, it will be difficult for them to think like an hacker and detect the unknown in the network. Threat hunters should focus to their mission to create their methodology and hunt. So, there should be dedicated personnels for threat hunting.
Coordination Across the Organization
Yes, threat hunters work in a strange mission, think like a hacker and search across the network but they must not work alone. A threat hunter should have a good relationships with key personnel in IT departments like network and system admins, help desk personnel and so on. With these relationships, they better understand the network, systems and more importantly the company’s and personnels’ way of doing business. For organization’s perspective, when a threat hunter finds a weaknesses during the hunting process, they inform critical IT personnel for remediation. This team working will result as a success in remediation phase of the incidents or weaknesses.
TTPs
Intelligence is critical for hunting for the known threats but hunters should be familiar with the TTPs of the attackers against the zero day threats. Threat hunters also should be aware of the updated or newly TTPs. Only with this knowledge hunters can act like an attacker. TTPs are at the top of Pyramid of Pain (defined by David Bianco).
Tools
To disclose the anomaly or malicious activity, threat hunters should use advanced tools like EDR, NDR, SIEM, FIM, etc.. These tools will help hunter to find abnormal activities if configured properly. In different posts, we tried to explain why they should be used.