At Splunk, we’re constantly on the hunt for new and emerging threats — tirelessly developing detection techniques to zero in on bad actors, while sharing key intelligence around cybercrime activity. But because threat intelligence can relate to so many different things — ranging from spear phishing campaigns to dark web dealings — it can be a challenge to cover and define all the specifics of what (or who) to look out for.

As your security capabilities improve with centralized log management, you can create proactive threat hunting queries. Setting baselines, determining abnormal behavior, and choosing an attack framework helps you mitigate risk and respond to incidents. To reduce key metrics like the mean time to investigate (MTTI) and mean time to respond (MTTR), security operations teams need to understand and create proactive queries based on their environments.

Security analysts have long been challenged to keep up with growing volumes of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, but their struggles have recently grown more acute. Only 46% of security operations leaders are satisfied with their team’s ability to detect threats, and 82% of decision-makers report that their responses to threats are mostly or completely reactive — a shortcoming they’d like to overcome.

With more people working from home, the threat landscape continues to change. Things change daily, and cybersecurity staff needs to change with them to protect information. Threat hunting techniques for an evolving landscape need to tie risk together with log data. Within your environment, there are a few things that you can do to prepare for effective threat hunting. Although none of these is a silver bullet, they can get you better prepared to investigate an alert.

In recent years, threat hunting has become much more widely adopted, but today the definition of threat hunting is still quite a controversial topic. Threat hunting is the art of finding the unknown in your environment, going beyond traditional detection technologies, with active cyber defence activity, proactively and iteratively searching through networks to detect and isolate advanced threats that evade existing security solutions.

Security is an essential part of any modern IT foundation, whether in smaller shops or at enterprise-scale. It used to be sufficient to implement rules-based software to defend against malicious actors, but those malicious actors are not standing still. Just as every aspect of IT has become more sophisticated, attackers have continued to innovate as well. Building more and more rules-based software to detect security events means you are always one step behind in an unsustainable fight.

During Sumo Logic’s Illuminate user conference, Heath Hendrickson, senior security architect at the Clorox company, and Gary Conner, senior threat protection lead, presented how they are leveraging Sumo Logic across security operations, threat hunting, IT operations, and more.

During a recent bug hunting binge I discovered my first two vulnerabilities that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution (RCE). No bragging rights were earned though, because finding and exploiting these issues was incredibly straightforward. I’m not humble bragging here (I wish). In fact, the issue underlying both vulnerabilities, which each affect a different content management system (CMS), is very basic and was literally the second thing I checked for.

Let’s talk visibility for a moment. Security visibility is a data-at-scale problem. Searching, analyzing, and processing across all your relevant data at speed is critical to the success of your team’s ability to stop threats at scale. Elastic Security can help you drive holistic visibility for your security team, and operationalize that visibility to solve SIEM use cases, strengthen your threat hunting practice with machine learning and automated detection, and more.